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SCO Owes Novell $2.5 Million
CrkHead writes "Groklaw has posted Judge Kimball's ruling on SCO v Novell. For those that have been following this saga, we finally get to watch the house of cards start to fall. For those new to this story, it started with SCO suing Novell and having all its motions decided in summary judgement and went to trial only on Novell's counter claims. Cheers to PJ for keeping us informed!"
The question is: Will Novell be able to collect?
Aren't they already bankrupt? So this money will come from where? Damn limited liability.Is there any way they can they go after the shareholders in any meaningful way once the company folds?
that they can't pay in SCO stock :) (or whatever moniker they go by now, pink slips or something to that effect).
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So Novell get $2.5m instead of $20m, does this mean SCO may survive this?
"Importantly, the court ruled that Novell has no right to any royalties from UnixWare or OpenServer sales by SCO, which is where the bulk of SCO's revenue is earned," SCO said in the statement. "This is also an important step forward in the capitalization and reorganization plan for SCO that will allow us to emerge from Chapter 11. We continue to disagree with the premise of this trial and believe that Novell is not owed anything, but that they have interfered with SCO's UNIX rights."
From their statement they seem relatively upbeat on what must of been a bad day for them.
It hints that Novell owns the SVRX code that SCO sold to MS - does this mean that MS will now sue?
Interesting times...
that 17 year old girl on Maury Povich's horrible show that goes through 20 different men trying to find the father of her kid. Give it up already!
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we finally get to watch the house of cards start to fall
Sadly, I think not. More likely, SCO will just find another deck of cards and carry on playing for some time.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
The whole thing has been a farse from start to end. That SCO has been allowed to continue this long without any evidence to back their claims up are insane. At the very least they should have been compelled to show some tangible evidence before the whole fishing expedition begun. The real stink begun when they could go on even after the extremely deep discoveries couldnt show any evidence at all that any code whatsoever came from SCO, not even "their own" code.
Something is just fishy about how the court system has handled all this.
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They will obviously pay in Linux CPU licenses. I hear they're worth $699.
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For those new to this story
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The first series of lawsuits by SCO are the ones that are to answer the question of whether linux, BSD or contain code from the real UNIX code (i.e. code originally created by AT&T)
The second set of lawsuits (mostly being fought between SCO and Novell) is to answer the question of who owns the UNIX copyrights, who has what rights to them and which of the deals done over the code are valid and which aren't as well as who owes who how much money
Nothing says says cheers to PJ like donating to help her keep the site running! Left side, your choice, Paypal or Amazon. Just sayin.....
What the judgment does is to set the amount of money SCO owes to Novell. That information goes into the bankruptcy.
An important detail is that the money SCO owes Novell was never SCO's. SCO was handling the money as an agent. It was always Novell's money. Judge Kimball ruled that SCO had breached its fiduciary duty and had unjustly enriched itself. If I understand correctly, that means Novell gets its money and then the other creditors get to fight over what's left.
The other thing that many have pointed out is that Novell will probably be awarded their lawyer fees. That amount will far eclipse the money Kimball has ruled on so far.
The ruling that sent the SCOundrels into bankruptcy court last year confirmed that the deal Caldera inherited from Santa Cruz Operation did *NOT* transfer copyrights from Novell, just gave rights to develop new code from it (i.e. Unixware) and act as Novell's collection agent on existing licenses. The current management (using the term *VERY* loosely), seeing their x86-UNIX business sinking, sued their former development partner, IBM, assuming they'd get a quick payoff to shut up and go away. Big surprise when IBM unleashed their lawyers right back at them. The present fiaSCO has ensued, only getting better when they tried to sue Novell for actually claiming the copyrights SCO was trying to use, which led to today's ruling.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!
This is independent of any legal action that the SEC or the local AG may decide to take.
SCO got off easy... this time. But the next shoe to drop will be if Novell sues Sun over OpenSolaris and Sun invokes the indemnity clause in its agreement with SCO. Then SCO will be on the hook.
The current judgment of $2.5M is practically nominal in the big picture. A large investor could cover that and SCO would escape a death sentence. SCO, or some version of it, is likely to survive for another day.
This is likely bad news for OpenSolaris and Sun. Novell now has Sun over a barrel. Sun was able to open source Solaris because it thought it bought a license from SCO to have free-and-clear rights to the SysV parts in Solaris. According to the decision, in 1994 Novell & Sun agreed for a 20-year non-disclosure on release of UNIX source code. That runs out in 2014. SUN then amended this with SCO to remove the non-disclosure. The last sentence on page 20 of the decisions says, "Absent the removal of the 1994 Sun Agreement's Confidentiality restrictions, Sun would not have been licensed to publically release the OpenSolaris source code". And on page 36k "In the 2003 Sun Agreement, SCO renegotiated a contract and expanded Sun's rights to technology still owned by Novell". Later on the same page "The court thus concludes and declares that SCO was without authority to enter into the 2003 Sun Agreement....".
Novell now has a HUGE stick to beat over Sun's head. OpenSolaris has basically been declared illegal.
If I remember correctly, Novell has declared that they are done suing over UNIX. So Sun might be off the hook. However, if Novell is not so gracious and sues Sun over OpenSolaris. Sun will loose and will seek for SCO to indemnify it. SCO won't have the money. Then SCO will finally die.
Given the money funneled in from Baystar on the recommendations of someone at MS, given the barely-disguised FUD money paid by Sun, who at the time were in one of their Linux-is-TEH-3V1L! phases, the idea of claiming Linux was encumbered and Not Suitable for Business was pretty obvious. Recall this was also the time of the attempt to show Linux was a ripoff of Minix by the opinion-for-hire deTocqueville Institute, whose funding also came in large part from MS. The money they threw SCOX to make Linux look bad was chump change. This provided them material to point their potential defectors-to-Linux at with arms-length deniability.
What they apparently didn't plan on was the strength of the grassroots response from the developer community to undo the PR spin. If anything, the result has been to strongly validate the Linux ecosystem as a safe bet.
SCOX DELENDA EST!!