SCO case: one more step in a tortuous saga

Sam Varghese
Friday, 18 July 2008 12:25

Opinion and Analysis

A few years back, Sun opened up a good portion of the source code to its Solaris operating system - and styled it as OpenSolaris. Some of this code was what it had bought from SCO, fully believing that SCO had the rights to the UNIX IP.

Now it remains to be seen whether Novell will try to create trouble for Sun. If Sun has to shut down its OpenSolaris project, that would be a disaster for the company as it has tried to restyle itself as an open source entity, using OpenSolaris as its poster boy.

Novell had sought something in the region of $US20 million as compensation for deals with SCO had done with said IP. It is unlikely that Novell will appeal the ruling that grants it $US2.55 million.

SCO now plans to appeal against the ruling made in August last year. And the central fight, its case against IBM, has yet to begin. Some people are masochists by nature.

A month after the August judgement, SCO filed for bankruptcy. In February 2008, it announced a $US100 million capital infusement from investment firm Stephen Norris Capital Partners and said it would be going private. That deal has since fallen through and SCO is still in the throes of bankruptcy.

In a statement placed on its website, SCO said: "We are reviewing today’s ruling by Judge Dale Kimball with our counsel and will be assessing the next steps over the coming days and weeks. This ruling is an important step in our ability to pursue the appeals to try to get all of our claims heard by a jury as soon as possible. We are pleased, however, that the court agreed that Novell is not entitled to anywhere near the more than $20 million dollars it was seeking.

"Importantly, the court ruled that Novell has no right to any royalties from UnixWare or OpenServer sales by SCO, which is where the bulk of SCO’s revenue is earned. This is also an important step forward in the capitalization (sic) and reorganization (sic) plan for SCO that will allow us to emerge from Chapter 11. We continue to disagree with the premise of this trial and believe that Novell is not owed anything, but that they have interfered with SCO's UNIX rights."

Novell has not made any public statement yet.