Linux on the desktop: the mass market!

Technology becomes friendlier

Students are encouraged to read the following to know more about Linux on the desktop:

• 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1) (ploum.net)
• 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 2) (ploum.net)

The SCO lawsuit

Remember the lawsuit between AT&T and Berkeley? Well, it turns out that through many acquisitions, merge and other stuff, a company name SCO suddenly decided they have the UNIX copyrights and that Linux was infringing them.

• SCO-Linux disputes (en.wikipedia.org)
• The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later (lwn.net)
• SCO loses again [LWN.net] (lwn.net)

There was never any UNIX line of code in Linux and it was clear that a real lawsuit would be lost. But the point was to ask for any Linux distributor to pay a "license fee" to SCO which would be way cheaper than to fight in court.

Fortunately, all Linux vendors decided to collaborate to fight this in court. But this took years and this could have slowend Linux adoption. For some, the SCO lawsuite werde guided by Microsoft to do to Linux what the AT&T lawsuit did to the BSD operating systems.