IBM and Red Hat win dismissal in long-running Linux code dispute

A US appeals court in New York has dismissed a lawsuit filed by software company Xinuos against IBM and Red Hat, bringing a decades-long legal dispute over the ownership of Linux code closer to a conclusion. Xinuos, a legal successor to the Santa Cruz Operation, alleged that IBM improperly integrated code from ‘Project Monterey’ into the Linux operating system, thereby breaching licensing agreements.

The court ruled that any potential claims regarding the ownership of the code were barred by the statute of limitations. Project Monterey was a 1998 collaboration between IBM, Intel, Sequent, and the Santa Cruz Operation intended to create a unified Unix operating system. As Linux gained dominance, IBM shifted its focus to the open-source project, leading to the legal friction.

The ruling provides significant legal certainty for the global developer community and companies utilizing Linux, as it mitigates the risk of retroactive licensing fees for the billions of devices running the software. While the decision resolves the litigation on procedural grounds, the underlying question of code ownership was not definitively settled by the court.