SCO‘s anti-Linux, sue-everybody business plan has finally caught up with them. Ars Technica reports about a federal ruling that SCO never actually owned the Unix copyrights that they were so busy suing people for violating. Now there’s a revenue model I’d never considered: suing people for violating copyrights you don’t own. Nice.
I’ve mentioned SCO here before, first back in 2003 when the Free Software Foundation weighed in on the affair, then again in 2004, when SCO shot a salvo at IBM, and a few other times since then. I think there’s a certain poetic justice in all of this. And I hope my next post about SCO will be to note that they’ve gone out of business. They’re trading at 38 cents/share as of this posting.
I put this in the computing category, but it probably belongs in philosophy. The SCO affair would make a good text-book case in business ethics. SCO started off with a claim of infringement which they never bothered to substantiate (because it could not be substantiated) and, successfully extorted money from companies for licenses to technologies they never owned, and to this day have never admitted any wrongdoing. Their campaign of fear, uncertainty, and doubt doubled back on them.