Novell Files for Summary Judgment Against SCO

rm69990 writes "Novell filed a motion with Judge Dale Kimball asking him to grant summary judgment or a preliminary injunction on Novell's claims that SCO wrongfully retained the money it received from Microsoft and Sun for their SVRX licensing and sublicensing agreements. Novell indicated over a year ago, when they initially filed their counterclaims against SCO, that they were planning on asking Judge Kimball to force SCO to turn over these monies. However, Novell only recently received the actual licensing agreements between SCO, Sun and Microsoft through discovery, despite demanding copies of them as early as 2003, and thus was unable to determine that SCO had breached the APA until now, which is why this motion is being filed so late in the case. This motion will likely bankrupt SCO if granted."

Comments

This could be it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Judge K. can decide on the issue of whether SCO has kept Novell's money. It is just a matter of law and there is no realistic dispute over the facts. (If there was a real dispute over facts then it would have to go to a jury.) It's just a matter of reading the contract.

So, Judge K. issues a summary judgement saying that SCO has to give Novell 25 million dollars right now. That bankrupts SCO. That doesn't stop the court cases though. The bankruptcy trustee appointed by the court replaces SCO's management. The bankruptcy trustee then negotiates with the creditors (mostly Novell and IBM). All the cases are settled out of court. My WAG is that the out of court agreements include SCO (as directed by the trustee) admitting that they are wrong about all the cases and all the counterclaims.

The counterclaim we all care about the most is IBM's counterclaim number 10. That's the one that says that there is no copyrighted Unix code in Linux. That will be the end of that particular piece of FUD.

My fondest wish is that Darl goes to jail for Lanham act violations or for something the SEC charges him with.

SCO is between a rock and a hard place

[Marcion]

SCO argues that the Asset Purchase Agreement gave SCO the rights to Unix, and thus the rights to hold IBM for account for its 'allegedly' putting Unix source code into Linux (most of the so-called 'evidence' for this was thrown out by the court because of the lack of line and file information). So if the Asset Purchase Agreement is held by the court to be valid then SCO owes Novell tens of millions. If the court says that the Asset Purchase Agreement is invalid then SCO does not have any property over the Unix code and Novell owns it all, Novell sacks SCO as their franchisee, and SCO do not have a business model or revenue income. Either way, I cannot see a future business model for SCO, their licence revenue is drying up year-on-year as people port their apps to Linux or Solaris; and all the people that can make money from Unix (as opposed to SCO who just lose it), that is Sun, IBM and HP, do not need SCO at all. Sun's Solaris is based on BSD and they have already bought a get out of jail free card for any Unix V pollution, and IBM had a licence from AT&T for AIX and want to move to Linux anyway, as with HP. Everyone else just uses Linux. If there is a market left for SCO, please tell me what it is?

Re:If it's granted, what happens to the IBM case?

[Marcion]

If I remember rightly, SCO has to trasfer 100% and then Novell hands back 5% as a fee.