Linux & open source
The 23-Year Lawsuit That Claimed to Own Part of Linux Just Died
On 10 August 2026 a US appeals court threw out the last live appeal in a legal fight that started with a forgotten 1998 UNIX project, ran through a $5 billion lawsuit, a bankruptcy, an asset sale, and a fresh filing in 2021. For 23 years a private company kept claiming it owned code sitting inside the Linux kernel. I went through the whole saga, because it is the closest the open source world ever came to a genuine extinction event, and because the thing that finally killed it was not a ruling on who was right.
