SCO Must Pay Novell for Unixware

By Alex Handy

August 15, 2008 —  SCO and Novell are still duking it out over licensing issues in Linux, and the latest round has gone to Novell.

U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball in July upheld his prior decision that Novell owns the rights to Unix. As such, SCO must pay just over US$2 million to Novell. SCO’s prior sales of licenses and protection fees, which it managed to get Sun Microsystems and Microsoft to pay, were found by Kimball to be illegal, because the intellectual property SCO claimed to be licensing was not theirs to license.

Despite the five years and many trials, SCO is still working on numerous other legal cases against Autozone, IBM and Red Hat. Kimball’s ruling might create a cascade of losses for SCO if other judges default to his decision as the precedent in the matter. Until that time, however, SCO, which declared bankruptcy late last year, will continue to litigate.

With the company still in bankruptcy as of last month, its monthly income statement for June—filed with the Delaware court in which the bankruptcy is taking place—showed a loss of $13,000, with just over $1.7 million in outstanding debt. The company’s total assets, including its offices in Germany and Japan, were valued at just over $1.3 million. For a brief period in February, SCO’s future looked brighter as a proposed attempt to take the company private surfaced. It turned out to be a bit of fantasy, however, and SCO’s fate would appear almost entirely in the hands of courts in Delaware and Utah.



Related Search Term(s): Unix, Novell, SCO

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