Novell vs SCO: Case closed
Posted in News by admin on November 25th, 2008 A federal judge has ruled that SCO owes Novell a little over $2.5 million, after insisting that the software company was given a financial boost from a 2003 licensing agreement with increasingly-doomed looking Sun Microsystems.
Judge Dale Kimball issued his final statement on the case on Thursday of last week, effectively ending the long-running battle between SCO and Novell. Kimball has waived SCO’s attempt to waive certain claims then resurrect them on appeal, and finalises the ruling back in July that ordered the sum of $2,547,817 to be paid to Novell by SCO for unilaterally agreeing to amend Sun’s license for the UNIX SVRX copyrights. They must also pay over $900,000 worth of interests on top of the figure. Ouch.
This leaves SCO with two choices: Stump up and pay the fine, or drag the case out for another few months. However, it’s not likely that an appeal would make a difference. The company doesn’t sell anything worth mentioning, and in September 2007, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
In February, a private equity firm agreed to breathe new life into the organisation with a $100 million cash injection, but the firm saw sense and dropped out of the deal, meaning SCO can’t afford to pay the ever growing bill to Novell.
Brilliantly, this legal battle was started by SCO, who decided to sue Novell in January 2004 for ‘slander of title action’, accusing Novel of stealing the claim t the UNIX SVRX copyrights.
Around a decade previous to these shenanigans, Novell sold its UNIX trademarks and other assets to SCO, and they assumed the deal included the UNIX copyrights as well. Fair enough, but they didn’t, so when SCO started to enter licensing agreements with companies like Sun Microsystems, and started to sue companies like IBM for breaching copyright, the result could be seen coming a mile off, not unlike a Lesley Neilson joke.
In August last year, judge Kimball ruled that the copyrights were actually Novell’s, killing off SCO’s case. This final verdict should be the nail in SCO’s coffin.
