SCO loses another round

Novell wins rights to Unix copyrights: SCO also owes Novell for licensing revenue paid by Sun and Microsoft BY Nancy Gohring August 11, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Novell Inc. won a significant ruling in its lengthy battle with The SCO Group Inc. on Friday. A judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, Central Division, found that Novell is the owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights, dismissing SCO's charges of slander and breach of contract.

OK, this is probably something that most of you have not been following. In fact, most are probably to young to remember when Novell bought the rights to the UNIX name and almost the same day turned them over to the Open Source consortium that now manages them. At the time, it was a pretty big deal.

The other topic here is the SCO battle, which if not the longest running IT lawsuit certainly is close to it (the Microsoft Anti-Trust case might actually be a longer battle and it certainly has bigger attention, but the mayhem that SCO has brought to the table is much further reaching and revolves around intellectual property - something even Microsoft is paying attention to the outcome of.)

That the court ruled this way is not a surprise. Novell bought the rights and that is that. It was well documented at the time and legal under the laws of the land, both then and now. While this is hardly a death blow to the other SCO cases, it does make them much harder to pursue.