The ancient Linux ownership row has been whacked again after Xinuos failed to revive claims against IBM and Red Hat.
According to Bloomberg Law, IBM prevailed against Xinuos before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on 10 August 2026. The court ruled that the copyright lawsuit was time-barred, which is not surprising, given that I have been writing about this particular row throughout my career in tech journalism.
The fight grew out of Project Monterey, a late-1990s attempt to build a Unix that could run across several processor architectures. SCO later claimed IBM had misused code from that project after Linux had ruined everyone’s grand Unix paperwork party.
SCO’s long-running scrap with IBM ended in 2021 with a $14.25 million settlement. That sum looked modest beside years of noise about Linux ownership, partly because SCO struggled to produce the smoking code cannon it kept hinting at.
Xinuos, another SCO successor, tried a fresh route. It argued that IBM had only a non-exclusive licence for the Project Monterey code and breached that licence when it incorporated the code into Linux.
The case was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, where Xinuos failed to keep the claim alive. Xinuos appealed, hoping the Second Circuit would see a licensing fight where the lower court saw a stale copyright dispute.
The appeals panel said the dispute concerned whether IBM “received, under the JDA, rights to use code to create derivative works from it.” It said IBM had maintained through decades of litigation that it had the right to use the code.
The judges found the claim “accrues only once” and said Xinuos would still be too late even under a three-year Copyright Act limit. The order said Xinuos’s remaining arguments were “without merit”, which is judge-speak for no biscuit.
Xinuos may yet seek a full-court rehearing, but those are long shots rather than a legal reset button. After more than two decades, the Linux ownership zombie now has one foot in the grave and the other on a procedural banana skin.
