Raise a glass to Novell

Judge Ted Stewart today again affirmed the Jury's decision in SCO v Novell. Since 2003, SCO has been attempting to argue a legal claim against Linux, by a variety of legal theories. They essentially all boil down to one or another arguments relating to SCO's purchase of UnixWare from Novell in the mid-90s. There are still a number of counter-claims outstanding against SCO, brought by IBM, Novell, and Red Hat, and it is conceivably possible that SCO will appeal the Judge's ruling to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.. but SCO is already operating under a court's supervision, and it seems a serious stretch that the court would allow them to continue making a nuisance of themselves to the courts with claims that judges and juries keep rejecting.

This is important because it removes a significant possible source of legal encumbrance of Linux and Unix-like operating systems going into the future, and removes some additional legal uncertainty around Open Source software in general. I'll be raising a glass tonight to the legal teams at Novell and IBM, and to the nice people at Groklaw who've been following this story over the years, who've been fighting to keep SCO from effectively claiming an ownership stake in the entire open source operating system industry.

In late trading, SCOXQ closed at 5 cents/share, down 7 cents/share in late afternoon trading.