SCO was the 'best thing that ever happened' to Linux

The multitude of law suits brought by SCO against companies selling and using Linux has been beneficial to the open source operating system, according to one of the most influential organisations in the Linux world.

Speaking at Queen Mary, University of London, on Monday night, Open Source Developer Labs chief executive Stuart Cohen said the lawsuits were "the best thing that ever happened to Linux".

Cohen, who heads the organisation that employs Linus Torvalds and lead kernel maintainer Andrew Morton, said that although the litigation is "nearly dead now", its legacy is the due diligence that was done around the world on the Linux code base.

"There was a lot of due diligence around the world with people looking at the code and looking at software stacks, and all this work validated that there was nothing there, no risk, no issue," said Cohen. "The SCO court case ended up on every Web site, in every newspaper and every magazine. Everybody had to do due diligence — you could not be a CTO or CIO and not do due diligence in 2003/2004 when SCO was suing end users," he added.

"And look at what happened with the market share; people did not say let's wait until this thing is over. If anything it accelerated the use of Linux, so it is one of the best things that ever happened to the operating system."

SCO filed a $5bn lawsuit against IBM in 2003 alleging that the computing giant had misappropriated SCO trade secrets and code copyrights in its work on Linux and AIX. Other lawsuits followed, and SCO later began threatening to take its own customers to court unless they agreed to pay licence fees for the Linux intellectual property that SCO claimed to own.

However, SCO received a damning indictment from the judge hearing the case against IBM recently; the judge said he found SCO's argument "puzzling". SCO also faces mounting financial woes, with revenues falling and a NASDAQ delisting on the cards.