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Sep 17, 2026 · Industry Insights

How a Dying Company's $5B Linux Lawsuit Collapsed — and Gave Us 'Signed-off-by'

The article recounts SCO Group's 2003 $5 billion lawsuit against IBM over alleged Unix code in Linux, detailing how Linus Torvalds' 1992 switch to GPLv2 made Linux impossible to monopolize, how Torvalds publicly debunked SCO's code claims line-by-line, how a 1995 contract revealed SCO never owned the Unix copyrights, and how the case led to the kernel's Developer Certificate of Origin (Signed-off-by) still used today.