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.
Both Novell and SCO could appeal Judge Kimball’s ruling; Novell had originally asked for $20 million, and SCO seems determined to fight this case down to the last paperclip and thumbtack sliding around in the back of its empty desks.
