Not to worry, zombies with a gambling addiction probably won’t eat your enterprise brains
Column It seemed like a classic April The First spoof. Indeed, some tech titles had it on their lists of best pranks of the day. But it’s true: the software zombie court case to end all zombie software court cases has woken from its slumber. Nearly 29 years after it first lurched from the crypt, SCO v The World Of Linux is back, and it smells just as bad as ever. The details need not worry us: they were bad enough at the time. Have a look at this timeline if you want to follow the trail of dead. At its most basic, the whole saga started with the reanimated Unix dev corpse SCO Group claiming it owned the rights to core technology in Unix and Linux, and that everyone else was using them illegally. An opening court case against IBM was followed by a salvo of letters demanding money from 1,500 companies, then the pre-IBM Red Hat countersued to stop the nonsense. This sort of thing went on for decades in various forms, with other bit players circulating in and out. Did SCO Group even own the rights to Unix it claimed it had got from Netware? Did those rights extend to code that everyone else was using? SCO Group presented this as a solid piece of litigation seeking to protect the rights of the innovator to profit from their work: a more correct image would be a skeletal hand stuffing a slot machine with coins. Lots and lots of coins. The odds were slim, but as with so many gambles the gambler is blinded by the size of the pot.
