Re: s/SCO/TSG/g
IIRC it wasn't SCO at all. There was "The Santa Cruz Operation" that was frequently called SCO. For most of the active part of the litigation, the plaintive was TSG (The SCO Group) who fooled others into referring to them as SCO. The Santa Cruz Operation got renamed to Tarantella to avoid making the deception too obvious.
The good news is this has nothing to do with the vast majority of Linux/Android users. TSG's barely surviving complaint is violation of tort. If you never entered into an agreement with TSG then they have nothing on you.
There was a complaint about IBM contributing to Linux. It failed for pretty much every possible reason. According to TSG, when IBM added code to AIX that made the code a part of System V and therefore TSG's property and so couldn't be contributed to Linux without TSG's permission. Adding code to AIX does not make it a part of System V which belonged to Novell (later acquired by Attachmate). IBM created design documents for new features. Those design documents were used by different teams of programmers to implement the features in AIX and Linux, so AIX code was not contributed to Linux.
TSG filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. What they got instead was a court appointed trustee who did a thorough job of converting TSG's (and Novell's) asserts into legal advice from his law firm. Something to do with System V was sold. I think the victim purchaser believed he had bought System V, which the trustee never had. TSG used to have the right to collect license fees for System V on behalf of Novell, give all the money to Novell and Novell would give back 5%. Long before the bankruptcy, TSG treated Novell's money as their own and there was no mention of the trustee sorting this out. The purchaser could have bought the right to collect license fees, but TSG could not transfer that right without Novell's permission.
Last I heard, TSG retained the litigation - and there is some value to it. David Boies of Boies Schiller and Flexner agreed his law partnership would do the legal work (including appeals all the way to the high court) for a percentage of the settlement. The obvious thing for the trustee to do is to keep sending BS&F to court until BS&F buy their way out. Clearly the Trustee and BS&F have not agreed on a figure yet.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
