SCO Owned

Today Groklaw reports that Judge Dale Kimball has concluded that Novell is the owner of Unix copyrights in a summary judgement of over one hundred pages. In addition the Judge said that SCO owes money to Novell for the payments it received from Sun and Microsoft. Thats the ballgame folks. Nothing more but mopping up.

Two court cases will be affected by this decision. The case SCO had filed against IBM, which was already undermined by a lack of evidence from SCO identifying infringing code, will now collapse. Novell had wavied any infringement by IBM early in the case, so now the copyright has been confirmed as owned by Novell that wavie becomes effective. IBM has some counter claims which will no doubt be litigated to the end.

Red Hat also had a court case filed to have Linux declared non-infringing. By the time Red Hat get to have a go at SCO there will only be bones. Novell will be able to put them into liquidation pretty quickly.

The big question right now surrounds Darl McBride and senior SCO management and their future. Now it is established that the threats were unfounded and based on intellectual property rights SCO didn't even have, will we see Darl personally stripped of his assets and imprisoned?

This may not be the final chapter. We will no doubt see Darl and company fight to the bitter end, or perhaps try to escape from any personal responsibility. What is now certain is the outcome. There is no hope that SCO will somehow win in court. The only question now is whether those responsible will be held accountable.

As the decision was made while the stock market was closed there was no crash of SCO value, although I can imagine this news will not help when the market opens on Monday.