The ancient dispute over ownership of UNIX, and perhaps Linux too, has returned to court. Again.

As The Register has explained many, many, times since this matter first went to court in 2003, the roots of the case are the 1998 alliance between IBM and a company called the Santa Cruz Operation which sold a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Those two companies, plus Intel and Sequent, created “Project Monterrey” – an effort to create a unified version of UNIX that could run on multiple processors.

By 2001, Project Monterrey was close to delivering a unified UNIX, an achievement made possible by blending code from IBM and SCO.

By then, a little project called “Linux” already ran on multiple processors. Big Blue decided Linux was the future and bailed from Project Monterrey – then allegedly contributed some Monterrey code to the open-source project and to its own AIX and Z operating systems. SCO felt it owned some of that code, so sued IBM.

SCO and its successors struggled to survive, but interested parties kept the lawsuit alive because the chance to emerge as owner of parts of the Linux codebase, and IBM’s code, had the potential to turn into a colossal payday.

The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault.

But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on.

The Xinuos case has burbled along quietly since, and on June 22nd reached the milestone of a hearing.

The matter has become a little more modern, if only because this hearing was held online and the presiding judge appeared to unwittingly be on mute at one point. But the arguments otherwise seemed to revisit Project Monterrey, debated the relevance of past litigation, contested who owned what, when they owned it, and how they could prove it. Xinuos argued IBM never had a license for SCO code. Big Blue argued that it did nothing wrong.

The core issue seems to be whether Xinuos even has the right to litigate the matter, or if some ancient legalese in the original agreements means the window for legal argument has long since expired.

The matter continues and appears likely to do so until either the heat death of the universe or the year of Linux on the desktop – whichever comes sooner. ®