| SCO Just Won't Quit |
Aug. 16, 2007
SCO may have lost a major legal battle with Novell, but it refuses to admit that it may have lost its Linux IP war.
When the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City ruled that Novell, and not
SCO, owned Unix's intellectual property, many SCO watchers assumed that it was game over for
SCO's long war against Linux and the companies--Novell, IBM and Red Hat--that supported it. Never one to stay down for long, despite numerous setbacks, SCO CEO Daryl McBride insisted in a letter to SCO's partners and customers that it's not down for the count.
McBride wrote, "We continue to believe that when SCO paid more than $100 million dollars for the UNIX technology to Novell in 1995, we purchased everything. We believe that 'All rights and ownership of UNIX and UnixWare, including but not limited to all versions of UNIX and UnixWare and all copies of UNIX and UnixWare (including revisions and updates in process), and all technical, design, development, installation, operation and maintenance information concerning Unix and UnixWare, including source code, source documentation, source listings …' means just what it says, but the court did not agree."
The court rules that, as Novell argued, the original APA (Asset Purchase Agreement) and Amendment No. 2 to the APA, specifically stated that Novell was not selling Unix's IP to SCO.
McBride continued, "The court ruling on Friday continues to assert that SCO owns all copyrights to the new development in all subsequent versions of UnixWare up through the most current release of UnixWare which includes substantial portions of SCO UnixWare Gemini 64. ... This ruling has no impact on SCO's ability to continue to develop and support all versions of UnixWare and OpenServer as well as the recently announced OpenServer 6M and UnixWare 7M as well as our new mobility products."
This is true. The court's decision did not interfere with SCO's ability to develop, sell and support SCO's Unix operating systems: UnixWare and OpenServer. Novell potentially could seek to strip SCO of any rights to sell Unix because it has not complied with Novell's demand that SCO stop its lawsuits against IBM and Sequent and didn't share the revenue from its Microsoft and Sun contracts. Novell, so far, has not taken any such actions.
Stepping away from the lawsuit, McBride also stated that SCO’s "primary business is not to litigate or to solely rely on outcomes in the court, but to rapidly evolve SCO's technology platforms to meet your needs in the marketplace. For more than three years SCO has continued to upgrade its UNIX operating systems (including releasing perhaps the single most significant upgrade in its history with OpenServer 6) as well as innovate in the areas of the fastest growing sector of IT, mobile computing."
While SCO is often seen by the public as focusing solely on its Linux lawsuits, that does not seem to be the case. It fought off BayStar Capital's attempt to get SCO to dump its operating system and application businesses and put all of its efforts behind its lawsuits.
So what happens next? Here, McBride falls back to vague promises. "We do feel a responsibility to you and our shareholders to defend our rights when we believe they have been violated and that is simply what we continue to do within the courts. In the end, our legal team will focus on the necessary actions needed to protect SCO, its customers and
shareholders."
—Steven J. Vaughan Nichols
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