“Due to what must be one of the worst-written contracts in technology-industry history, it turned out that SCO didn’t even own the Unix copyrights it was suing over.”
SCO sued IBM for at least $1 billion, later $5 billion, and pitched a $1,399 per-CPU fee to run Linux. Microsoft funded it and bought licenses loudly. The “millions of lines” of stolen code turned out to be one ia64 snippet that was already gone. The kernel got a certificate of origin and a legal defense out of it. Microsoft got years of fear for the price of a few licenses.