Tag Archive: SCO

U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball has ordered (PDF) SCO to pay Novell some $2.5 million dollars to make up to royalties it collected from Sun Microsystems for licensing the Unix operating system…only, it turned out, SCO didn’t own the Unix copyright, Novell did.

SCO’s trail of litigation over the ownership of Unix copyrights extends back several years, and involves suits against both Novell and IBM, the latter of which accused the technology giant of contributing proprietary code to Linux. SCO was never able to demonstrate where that proprietary code might be, though, and the case with Novell came to a head last year with Judge Kimball ruling Novell had never transfered copyrights on the Unix operating system to SCO; that collapsed what many industry watchers have categorized as the house of cards that comprised SCO’s case. A month later, the company had filed for bankruptcy protection.

Last month, Judge Dale Kimball ruled that SCO does not own copyrights to Unix and Unixware, gutting SCO’s long-running case against Novell and, in turn, the broader Linux software development community, which SCO claimed owed it damages for copyright infringement. SCO had largely been keeping its operations going on the prospects of a major win in court; now, in the wake of its defeat, SCO has chosen to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a move to protect its assets as it moves to deal with legal and financial challenges.

In a 102-page ruling (PDF), Judge Dale Kimball has dealt what many see as the killing blow in SCO’s infamous lawsuit against Novell over copyrights to the Unix operating system, finding that Novell is the owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights. The ruling lifts a cloud from over the Linux and free software movements, which could have faced serious copyright and intellectual property issues if SCO had proven a claim to Unix copyrights and tried to assert them against Linux.