Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Novell Wins Victory Over SCO In Unix Copyright Trial

A jury in the District Court of Utah said Tuesday that Novell owns the rights to Unix copyrights, which SCO had been using as part of its attack on the Linux operating system. According to Novell, the jury confirmed that Novell owned Unix copyrights, which SCO had claimed it owned due to a sale by Novell of its sale of Unix technology to Santa Cruz Operation in 1995. SCO had used that intellectual property as a key part of its lawsuits against IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and others over the Unix operating system. Novell said it is "committed" to protecting Linux, including defending the OS on the intellectual property front. The loss is a further setback to SCO, which had earlier been ordered to pay $3.5M to Novell in 2008 over the dispute over the ownership of the Unix OS code. SCO has been engaged in a legal battle with IBM, Novell, and others since 2004 over the ownership of source code in the Linux operating system.