SCO Claim To Unix Dead in the Water

Late Friday Judge Kimball has ruled that:

..the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.

The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent". This means that SCO has no rights to assert against IBM and the case is dead. We all knew that SCO was at a dead end but the judge has put the final nail in the coffin.

This also has another interesting parallel. I am not a lawyer but the core of SCO's claim is that is that Linux is an unauthorized derivative of Unix.

Now if Novell clearly owns Unix and it is a derivative of Unix (now authorized) there is now a ton of prior art for the Linux Operating System. The significance is this. If Unix is prior art for Linux then Microsoft's claims of patent infringement as it relates to the Linux OS itself (not packages like Samba etc) are dead in the water.

It will be interesting to see what happens in this respect now that Linux has a heavy provenance.

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