Novell to SCO - Pay Up

gosherm writes with word that, now that the dust is beginning to settle on the long-running SCO case, Novell wants to get paid. Now. They're requesting that the customary stay on SCO's finances (as a result of their bankruptcy) be lifted so that Novell can begin recouping some of its losses from the protracted legal battle. "'We need to adjudicate if this is money owed to Novell or if it is Novell's property,' said Bruce Lowry, spokesman for Novell. That could determine how quickly Novell can recover those funds. And time is of the essence since there's a possibility SCO 'may run low or even completely out of cash during the process of trying to reorganize,' Novell said in court documents filed Thursday. Novell is also trying to protect royalties SCO collects from Unix and Unixware software licensees and remits annually to the software developer. SCO is required to continue to remit between $500,000 and $800,000 annually to Novell -- the next payment is due Nov. 14. SCO remitted $696,413 to Novell between the third quarter of 2006 and the second quarter of this year."

Comments

The title is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO collects fees for Novell. There is no disagreement about that. What Novell is asking for is that those fees be paid through to Novell. This has nothing to do with the major claim, tens of millions, about the Microsoft and Sun licenses. This is just about the routine license fees that continue to roll in.

AllParadox described it best. He likened SCO to a store clerk. The money the clerk collects belongs to the store owner. The clerk has no claim to it at all. If the clerk goes bankrupt, the trustee can't claim that it is part of the bankruptcy estate.

The reason that SCO jumped (or tried to jump, it hasn't been granted yet.) into chapter 11 was that the Utah court was about to apportion the amount of money it had to pay Novell for the Microsoft and Sun licenses. Because of that, Novell has warned that it is going to file something claiming that SCO acted in bad faith. My WAG is that the bankruptcy judge will allow the Utah case to go forward so as to determine the amount of money SCO owes Novell. Since SCO has little chance of being a successful business, I am also guessing that they will be put in chapter 7. In other words, they won't be re-organizing, they will be liquidating.

Comical Ali lives?

[Epsillon]

if you look inside that appeals process and you take a microscope and look at the record of Kimball's summary judgment rulings that have gone to appeals, he gets overturned the vast majority of the time. It's nearly two-thirds of the time.

Um, Darl, this isn't the sort of thing you say about someone holding the contents of your codpiece in his hands. He's already ruled that your company, of which you are CEO, with responsibility for the company's actions, has committed conversion and you may just have annoyed him a touch with that quote. I really do hope the Honourable Dale A. Kimball sees what you said. The result could be rather interesting.

Not to mention the ratio of appealed to non-appealed cases might have some bearing on the soundness of his judgments. Sometimes it helps to know just how many of these summary judgments have people "banged to rights" before we start looking at the appeal successes.

But best of British to you, old son. You really are quite, quite funny. Erm, is that a tank in the background?

Who Will Get Unix?

[Doc Ruby]

One issue of the SCO/Novell suit is whether SCO owns the Unix System V code (by owning its copyrights), or whether Novell still does instead. Novell didn't seem to be doing any business depending on owning the Unix copyright, so even if this suit is settled (probably by the judge, in a binding decision) specifying that Unix belongs to Novell either because SCO never owned it, or that SCO did own it but must surrendered it to Novell as compensation for damages, Novell will probably own it. But what will they do with it?

Will they sell it "again", this time retaining their rights to use it that will prevent any attempt at the kind of extortion SCO attempted (whether or not it was legitimately based)? Will they keep it and use it themselves, other than to protect their right to include it in Linux? Will they kill it so it doesn't cause any problems in the new market Novell is in (maybe because Microsoft wants it out of the way once and for all)? Or will they perhaps kill just the copyright, and put it all into the public domain, or under GPL - perhaps just including it in a revised Linux kernel?

Will Novell perhaps release a Linux compatible layer made of Unix that interoperates with only the Novell distro, and with Vista?

The SCO/Novell suit could turn out to be just a preliminary battle. The next chapter of Unix's history could turn out to be the really interesting one. Which, with that kind of relativity, could be extremely interesting.