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SCO Goes Down in Flames: Novell owns Unix
Aug. 10, 2007
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The day Linux fans have been waiting for since SCO attacked Linux on May 12, 2003 has finally arrived. U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball has ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns Unix's IP (intellectual property) rights. This, in turn, means the end of SCO's cases against IBM.
In his 102-page decision, Kimball went on to rule that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent" [story], Thus, not only does Novell own Unix, SCO's cases against IBM have essentially been destroyed.
Putting salt into SCO's wounds, Kimball also ruled that while "The court ... is precluded from granting a constructive trust with respect to the payments SCO received under the 2003 Sun and Microsoft Agreements [story] because there is a question of fact as to the appropriate amount of SVRX Royalties SCO owes to Novell based on the portion of SVRX products contained in each agreement." In short, SCO owes Novell at least some of the funds it received from its Microsoft and Sun Unix licensing deals, which it used to fuel its anti-Linux lawsuits.
In the end, what did SCO in was not its ever more shaky IP claims against Linux, but the contract that gave SCO the right to sell and market Unix, but not its IP rights. Since February of 2004, Novell had been insisting that in the original APA (Asset Purchase Agreement) and Amendment No.2 to the APA, it never sold Unix's IP to SCO.
Why did Microsoft and Sun support SCO?
Jun. 05, 2007
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Back in the beginning of SCO's all-out assault on Linux and IBM, the Unix company received a much needed financial boost to its lawsuit plans with two major contracts. These deals with Microsoft and Sun brought SCO $26.5 million. This money, in turn, fueled SCO's lawsuits.
At the time, many critics of SCO wondered what in the world Sun and Microsoft could have been buying from SCO. Most people thought the answer was that they were buying an attack on a rival company, IBM, and a rival operating system, Linux.
Now, as a byproduct of SCO v. Novell -- the case over who really owns Unix's IP (intellectual property) -- and thanks to Groklaw, we now know what Sun was buying from SCO (PDF download). In part, it does seem to be an attack on Linux; but that wasn't all.
According to the court exhibit, Sun bought a "right to use license" (RTU license) for its commercial Linux end-users. In addition, Sun was buying "a UnixWare source code license to developers," and both licenses "contained a covenant not to sue, which provided that the licensee would not be exposed to liability for the use of SCO's intellectual property in Linux."
Nowhere does the exhibit explain in any detail exactly what SCO IP was hidden within Linux. Does that sound to you like the sort of vague patent claims made by Microsoft in regards to its recent patent deals with Novell and with Xandros? It does to me.
What makes this even odder is that, according to the exhibit, Microsoft and Sun also paid for UnixWare rights, and incidental rights to the older UNIX System V source code. Since they had paid for the rights to use Unix, why should they also be paying SCO not to sue them for the use of Linux?
My conclusion, then, as now, is that both companies were paying for SCO to attack IBM and Linux. It's difficult for me to see it in any other light. Both companies, after all, already had licenses to use SCO's Unix and IP.
In addition, though, this document supports the contention by Jonathan Schwartz -- then Sun VP of software and today Sun's president and CEO -- in an 2003 eWEEK interview that Sun had bought "rights equivalent to ownership" of Unix.