In a blow to the SCO Group, Dale A. Kimball, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah Central District, has ruled that Novell owns the disputed copyright to the UNIX operating system. The judge also ruled that SCO must drop its suits against IBM Corp and Sequant as well as pay Novell part of its licensing fees from Sun and Microsoft.
Here's an excerpt from "Novell Wins Right to Unix, Dismissing SCO":
The ruling is good news for organizations that use open-source software products, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. "From the perspective of someone who is adopting open-source solutions to run in the enterprise, it proves to them that the industry is going to defend the platform, and that when organizations attack it from a legal perspective, that the industry collectively will defend it," he said.
Here's an excerpt from "Judge Says Unix Copyrights Belong to Novell":
The court's ruling has cut out the core of SCO's case and, as a result, eliminates SCO's threat to the Linux community based upon allegations of copyright infringement of Unix," said Joe LaSala, Novell's senior vice president and general counsel.
Sources: Gohring, Nancy. "Novell Wins Right to Unix, Dismissing SCO." InfoWorld, 10 August 2007; Markoff, John. "Judge Says Unix Copyrights Belong to Novell." The New York Times, 11 August 2007.
