Admittedly SCO is on the back foot when it comes to public sentiment. It has become the antithesis of the open source community.

The company's CEO Darl McBride hasn't helped, spruiking claims that Linux has a "volunteer fire department support model".

The truth is SCO has been busy putting out a few fires of its own since the drama began.

Soon after filing its suit the US Securities and Exchange Commission threatened to delist the company from the Nasdaq for not filing its annual report, then SCO had to take measures to cap its legal bill at US$31 million, suffered a 99 percent drop in Unix licensing revenue in the second quarter of 2004, and had to close offices in Spain, Italy and Ireland.

This doesn't include the fake Nigerian e-mail parodies of the case that have circulated on the Internet. McBride himself has even received prank calls at 2am in the morning from a stranger professing to be Linux Torvalds.