It reminds me of a number of events such as when IBM was part of a certain standards workgroup and IBM tried to assert copyrights over the standards the workgroup was working on. Another example: the GIF image format. After years of use of the GIF files format, its owner comes out to assert its rights, probably expecting that, given the wide use of this image format, it could extort a lot of money from unsuspecting users. There seems to be a pattern where a company waits for its product to become a "de facto" format of sorts and then comes out expecting to "just rake in the money", as it were. SCO might have tried to insert code into Linux to set the Linux community up for extortion.