SCO was the 'best thing that ever happened' to Linux

SCO's litigation over Linux was hugely unpopular but there was a big upside, says the chief executive of Open Source Development Labs

The mulbreastude of law suits brought by SCO against companies selling and using Linux has been beneficial to the open source operating system, according to one of the most influential organisations in the Linux world.

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Speaking at Queen Mary, University of London, on Monday night, Open Source Developer Labs chief executive Stuart Cohen said the lawsuits were "the best thing that ever happened to Linux".

Cohen, who heads the organisation that employs Linus Torvalds and lead kernel maintainer Andrew Morton, said that although the litigation is "nearly dead now", its legacy is the due diligence that was done around the world on the Linux code base.

"There was a lot of due diligence around the world with people looking at the code and looking at software stacks, and all this work validated that there was nothing there, no risk, no issue," said Cohen. "The SCO court case ended up on every Web site, in every newspaper and every magazine. Everybody had to do due diligence ? you could not be a CTO or CIO and not do due diligence in 2003-2004 when SCO was suing end users," he added.

"And look at what happened with the market share; people did not say let's wait until this thing is over. If anything it accelerated the use of Linux, so it is one of the best things that ever happened to the operating system."