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In January 2005, a judge ordered IBM to turn over 2 billion lines of code to SCO Group so that the small, Lindon, Utah-based company could examine it for evidence that IBM had included copyrighted Unix code in Linux. At that moment, the open-source movement suddenly lost a bit of its swagger.
The billion-dollar lawsuit threatened to dampen open source’s mounting momentum by scaring off potential customers, software developers, and investors. It also raised the specter of miring IBM—Linux’ rich and powerful benefactor—in a distracting legal battle.
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