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!"

Comments

Not important

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is: Will Novell be able to collect?

SCO reminds me of

[nawcom]

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!

The end? I doubt it.

[AmIAnAi]

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.

This isnt any victory.

[miffo.swe]

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.

Re:This isnt any victory.

[morgan_greywolf]

Not at all. IANAL, but from personal experience with involvement in such a legal dispute, I wouldn't say that discovery was anymore deep than normal. The only difference is, SCO dragged their feet and dragged their feet as much as possible. But in so much as what was asked for? Not really unusual at all. The way Judge Kimball and his magistrate handled it? Nothing unusual there, either. If anything, Kimball has been one of the most fair judges I've ever seen.

You can't just stop a court trial for no reason. The judge can't just throw the whole thing out. There are rules that have to be followed and Kimball did, in essence, throw out the vast majority of SCO's claims.

In fact, most of what's left is IBM's counterclaims. That's when the hammer will really fall.

licenses

[edalytical]

They will obviously pay in Linux CPU licenses. I hear they're worth $699.

Re:licenses

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, that is, if you use metric conversion and not imperial conversion. Imperial conversion is pretty easy, you take the dollar amount you have and then invade the country you want to convert your money to, subtract the head of state, add a puppet government and then multiply by the compound interest they owe for the weapon system you financed them +/- any collateral damage and/or hush money.

For those new to this story?!

[niceone]

For those new to this story

Welcome to slashdot! I advise you to leave now while you still can.

Nothing says says cheers to PJ like......

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Nothing says says cheers to PJ like donating to help her keep the site running! Left side, your choice, Paypal or Amazon. Just sayin.....

Not per se

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Money comes from where?

[MBGMorden]

"Oh, they've encased him in carbonite!"

Actually, a carbonite encased Darl might not look too bad hanging on a wall in Novell's throne room . . .

So SCO stays alive and OpenSolaris dies?

[HighOrbit]

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.