So, it’s clear that the SCO bullying didn’t work, but did it backfire? I think it did, and here’s a brief list of the benefits that I see as having come out of the battle.
The General Public License (GPL) held its own in court, shutting the mouths, one might expect, of all the naysayers who for years claimed it would fail on its first real court challenge. It not only held its own, it led to a SCO rout, with SCO at first loudly proclaiming it was unconstitutional, and later — after IBM brought a counterclaim based on SCO violating the GPL and hence being guilty of copyright infringement of IBM’s GPL’d code in Linux by continuing to distribute the code — wrapping itself in the GPL flag, and meekly proclaiming that they had never repudiated it but had always abided by it.
The community bonded more tightly than ever, and showed that it will support Linux and free and open-source software and any company that stands up for it.