Linux Was Almost Destroyed By This Lawsuit

Key Takeaways

nowadays if you need a Unix system there is a very limited set of options if we are talking about the desktop space Macos is by far the biggest most people just don't use it like a Unix system though but there are a lot of tech people professors developers things like that that absolutely swear by it there are a lot of people out there who also make use of some form of BSD whether that's open BSD FreeBSD and things like that but most of that usage is in things like servers but for the most part when we are talking about Unix in a modern context we are generally referring to Linux but this wasn't always the case there was a time when Linux didn't exist yet and during that period the space was basically dominated by all of these companies offering their various proprietary Unix offerings competing over a fairly small but growing market share when Linux hit the scene though that all changed Linux put a lot of these companies pretty much out of business or forced them to shift into other Ventures as it pretty much devoured all of the market share and a big part of that is it's free and it coincided with the growth of the internet so it made it incredibly competitive compared with the other offerings obviously it was also good but not having to pay for it is a pretty big deal but there was one particular company who wasn't exactly happy about this that being the SEO group who in 2003 failed not one not two not three but four separate lawsuits against companies using Linux now an important distinction needs to be made between SEO Santa Cruz operation and the SEO group The SEO group was originally called Caldera systems before eventually renaming into Caldera International and that eventually the SEO group they purchased the rights of unixware SEO Unix and a bunch of other software from SEO they were not the ones who actually made it the original SEO went on to become Tarantella Inc they are completely unrelated to these lawsuits when they acquired these rights they changed their name to the SEO group and not even a year later after acquiring these rights they went on an absolute Rampage against seo's ex-customers who are now using Linux with the most famous lawsuit you've probably heard of this one being SEO versus IBM but that's only one of of them they also went after AutoZone yes that Auto Zone that sells car parts also Daimler Chrysler now known as the Mercedes-Benz group along with a company called novel this was a software development firm mainly developing corporate projects also the original owners of Susa Linux so let's go all the way to the start with SEO versus IBM in 2003 whereby the SEO group basically argued that Linux is really good and it shouldn't be really good it got really good way too quickly so surely IBM must have shared some SEO trade secrets with Linux kernel developers copying code owned by the SEO group into the Linux kernel violating their copyright and being a breach of their software licensing agreement thereby lowering the value of the Unix offering owned by the SEO group this had some interesting reactions from the Foss world like the Linux operating system was unlikely to contain Unix code as it had been written from scratch by hundreds of collaborators with a well-documented provenance and revision history that was entirely in the public view Caldera systems had begun as a Linux company before buying seo's Unix business and certain assets related to it and has added many linux-like features to SEO Unix and any common code may have in fact been copied from Linux into SEO Unix and Linus torvold saying I allege that SEO is full of it and the Linux process is already the most transparent process in the whole industry let's face face it nobody else even comes close to being as good at showing the evolution and source of every single line of code out there so far we've been in the tame section from now on it only gets more ridiculous following this lawsuit against IBM and while it was still pending a lawsuit was filed against the SEO Group by Red Hat they wanted the court to make a permanent injunction against seo's campaign against Linux basically make them stop doing it and make two declaratory judgments that red hat has not violated seo's copyright and the red hat has not violated seo's Trade Secrets and several other claims for Relief with the SEO group responding by saying of course we will prepare our legal response as required by your complaint be advised that our response will likely include counter claims for copyright infringement and conspiracy I must say that your decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux talk about the pot calling the kettle black this lawsuit remained pending based on the result of SEO versus IBM now it gets even more fun throughout all of this the SEO group were claiming that they were the owners of Unix not just the owners of their specific version of Unix but they were the owners of the Unix copyright novel weren't exactly too happy about this because years prior they had purchased something called the Unix system Laboratories from a t and with this came the Unix copyright and the original Unix source code editing Broody here this source code code was partially contained within unixware which was eventually purchased by SEO and passed on to the SEO group but the copyright for Unix was separate from this and years prior they had already settled a case with the Berkeley software distribution otherwise known as BSD over who is the rightful owners of Unix this was a part of a greater Saga called the Unix Wars maybe at some point I'll do a dedicated video on that now during all of these lawsuits novel put out a press release basically saying we support Linux and making it very clear who the owners of Unix are and the fact that the SEO group are not those owners and uh they weren't exactly too happy about this and called it slander which they desperately needed to be true due to something known as the SEO Source division they were going around to Linux customers primarily in the corporate space and charging them 699 dollars per CPU to be using Linux because if they really own Unix then they can charge you whatever they want to be using a Unix system so as you might expect the SEO group failed a lawsuit against novel now this idea of charging people money for something they absolutely shouldn't be charged for this was not a one-time thing that SEO Source was doing and this actually led to two of the lawsuits those being with AutoZone and Dame La Chrysler both of these companies were at one point customers of SEO and then the SEO group but they were like you know what um this Linux thing it does everything we need it's free so the SEO group straight up trade to sue their ex-customers for switching to a competitor initially Dame La Chrysler didn't even respond to their letter they just like we don't care which is actually what a lot of companies did did when they got a letter from SEO Source they didn't have any rights to be charging people for Linux so go away we just don't care but the SEO group disagreed they claimed that because they owned Unix that these companies that were using Linux and not paying the money were in violation of their Unix copyright which they claimed they had so everything hinged upon the fact that they owned Unix and that Unix code was being used in Linux basically it was this giant castle being built on Sand and they really hoped there was some rock under that sand so how did all these claims end up going well the first one to be dealt with was Dame La Chrysler in 2004 SEO and Dame La Chrysler were basically in agreement to dismiss the case I think they they might have taken on a bit too many cases at once and didn't really know what to do but they could pursue the case again in the future granted they pay Daimler crisis legal fees in 2009 after the SEO group had already gone bankrupt and it was going through the bankrupt Court a private settlement was made between AutoZone and the SEO group in 2010 a jury determined that novel did in fact own the rights to Unix which they already knew they owned leading to them being awarded 2.5 million and finally in 2021 IBM settled paying the now bankrupt SEO group handled by the tsg bankruptcy trustee 14.25 million under the demand that they go away and not bother them again they didn't agree that they were in the wrong here they were just sick of dealing with them and it was cheaper to pay them now this video was basically like a surface level look at all of these things going on honestly I could probably make a 10 part series and there would still be more to cover just let alone the fact that Microsoft probably funded a good part of the lawsuit if you go back and look at the Halloween documents if you have not seen that video go and check it out if you want to see a really great article about this just focusing on the IBM case there is a really great write-up over on lwn I highly recommend you go and read it also go and check out the Wikipedia articles and all the things they link to there is so much stuff going on here and I'm sure you're gonna have some fun with it so let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below did you know about this lawsuit do you think the entire thing was ridic Oculus do you even care that it happened and you think Windows is better I would love to know so if you like the video go and like the video If you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here check out the patreon scrubs Dolly bear putty Linked In the description down below that's gonna be it for me and Red Hat bad actually red Hat's good in this case I guess [Music] [Music]