SCO v. Novell Goes To the Jury

Excelcia writes "Closing arguments in the six and a bit year old slander of title case between SCO and Novell occurred today and the case is finally in the hands of the jury. It's been an interesting case, with SCO alternately claiming that the copyrights to UNIX did get transferred to them, and that the copyrights should have been transferred to them. 'Judge Ted Stewart said, after the jury left to begin to deliberate, that in all his years on the bench, he's never seen such fine lawyering as in this case.' We're not going to find out the results until at least Tuesday, however, as one juror is taking a long weekend. Great lawyering notwithstanding, we can all hope next week that the Energizer bunny of all spurious lawsuits will finally go away."

Comments

Re:I'd hate to be on that jury...

[Anonymous Coward]

The jury portion of the trial started on March 8 (link is to a PDF).

Re:Is UNIX even worth suing over these days?

[cpghost]

Linux and the BSDs have pretty much made UNIX obsolete.

I don't know about Linux, but BSD definitely contained Unix code from USL, and vice-versa. They settled out of court. Should ever SCO decided to go after BSD, it would open a big can of worms. More details can be found in The Unix Heritage Society and Bitsavers Archives.

Re:Is UNIX even worth suing over these days?

[Alex Belits]

1. Since settlement was not disclosed at the time, BSD development continued with 4.4-Lite, that was specifically created to exclude everything that was disputed with USL.

2. This can of worms WAS opened during SCO saga, and resulted in the whole thing being disclosed to the publuc. Basically, USL secretly agreed to stop being a bunch of assholes.