One more nail in the coffin: Nasdaq delists SCO

After filing for Chapter 11 protection in September, The SCO Group has been delisted from the Nasdaq trading index. The companies ticker symbol, formerly SCOX is kaput, although the non-indexed SCOX.PK (PK stands for "pink sheet") remains.Groklaw has brilliantly juxtaposed today's press release with the 2003 release stating SCO's intent to sue IBM.

For the uninitiated, SCO, formerly known as Caldera Systems, was at one time one of the largest Linux distributors for the business environment. In 2003, the newly named SCO systems sued IBM for $1 billion dollars, claiming that IBM's Linux products used parts of UNIX (which SCO claimed to own the rights to), thus devaluing the SCO brand. The story is extremely sordid and complicated, this Wikipedia page has a pretty good assessment of the various controversies and Groklaw has covered the various lawsuits involving SCO since 2003.

In short, SCO tried to claim intellectual property ownership of various parts of source code they claimed to be part of the open-source Linux kernel (one of the more insane claims, that SCO owned UNIX was legally dismissed in August 2007, and the actual owner of the UNIX and UNIXWare code, Novell, was awarded damages). SCO then sued manufacturers of competing Linux distributions for various claims ranging from the usage of SCO owned source code, trade secret violations and anti-competitive practices. And this from a company who's most successful product was actually called, "OpenLinux."

Objectivity aside - we can't wait for these guys to finally be out of business for good.

[via Slashdot]

Tags: delisted nasdaq, DelistedNasdaq, lawsuit, linux, linux source code, LinuxSourceCode, nasdaq, news, novell, opensource, sco