Novell start to discuss the implications of the legal victory they achieved against SCO on the 10th August.

In a decent summing up of opinion on infoworld by Elizabeth Montalbano, we get:

“We’re not interested in suing people over Unix,” Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry said. “We’re not even in the Unix business any more.”

And Novell’s own CMO John Dragoon gives a neat and concise diary of events that led to Friday’s momentous decision:

“This is a great outcome for Linux and the open source community. A big cloud has been lifted. Customers and developers can deploy and develop on Linux with increased confidence that SCO’s copyright allegations around Linux will be put to rest. “

Checking SCO’s stock quote tells us what the market really thinks: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=scox. Down to just 37c when I looked. That’s a fall of over 75% since market close on Friday and a market capitalisation of about $8m (or approx. £4m in Sterling).

I can’t see how SCO can remain a viable business for much longer. As an anonymous commentator wrote on a mailing list - Novell could buy them with spare change and that would be the end of that. Although it’s a bit of a waste of $8m I guess. There are plenty of other companies out there with that sort of cash to burn…

• Microsoft Corporation: $268.14B
• International Business Machines Corp. : $151.90B
• Hewlett-Packard Company: $122.69B
• Red Hat, Inc. : $4.12B
• Novell, Inc. : $2.26B
• Sun Microsystems, Inc.: $16.74B
• Oracle Corporation : $99.96B

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“May we live in interesting times…”

On Friday last, the judge in the extraordinarily long court case brought by SCO (The SCO Group Inc. formerly the Santa Cruz Operation) against Novell gave his judgement. SCO lost.

The basics of the case, which is both complex and long-winded as only the American legal system can, was that SCO claimed they owned the copyright for UNIX and that Novell didn’t. The implications of this fairly simple claim went much deeper however. If SCO had won it could have opened the door for massive litigation against IBM and other vendors of UNIX and also had serious implications for Linux as they also claimed that Linux contained copyrighted UNIX code…

And more succinctly put by the Washington Post…

Software company Novell owns the copyrights covering the Unix computer operating system, a federal judge ruled, deciding against the company that bought certain rights to Unix from Novell 12 years ago. “The bill of sale is clear: all copyrights were excluded from the transfer,” U.S. District Judge Dale A. Kimball wrote in his 102-page ruling. SCO Group Inc. is seeking billions of dollars in royalty payments from hundreds of companies that use the Linux computer operating system, which is modelled on Unix. The ruling means SCO probably cannot successfully sue Linux users for copyright violations.

The ruling given last week should now clear the way for the legally challenged/scared corporations of the US to use OSS/Linux with much less fear about potential law suits. This can only increase the pace of growth and adoption of these disruptive technologies.

Here’s my Recommended Reading list for this story.

• Groklaw - This is where the in-depth coverage all started and remains,
• Dana Gardner - Good summing up
• The Inquirer - Clear overview of implications
• New York Times - Brief, clear, articulate
• Novell’s PR Blog - Short but sweet!

Well - this looks like the main legal barriers for adoption of Linux (especially in the USA) have been removed, the SCO v IBM lawsuit is groundless and SCO will probably go bust as they will have some very BIG bills to pay.

Following note added 20:30pm (15:30 EDT) 13/08/2007:

Just before the USA markets closed I thought I’d see what the investors made of the judge’s decision. Not good. SCO (NASDAQ: SCOX) was down by a whopping 73% from $1.56 on the close Friday. It opened this morning at 0.45c and dipped during trading to a low of $0.35. Ouch….

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Here’s another BIG announcement furthering the onward march of Open Source on the desktop:

Lenovo and Novell today announced an agreement to provide preloaded Linux* on Lenovo ThinkPad notebook PCs and to provide support from Lenovo for the operating system. The companies will offer SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 from Novell® to commercial customers on Lenovo notebooks including those in the popular ThinkPad T Series, a class of notebooks aimed at typical business users, beginning in the fourth quarter of 2007. The ThinkPad notebooks with the Linux-preload will also be available for purchase by individual customers.

There are two big things with this announcement:

1. Novell’s SLED is enterprise software aimed at business users. This is different (rather than either better or worse) to the Dell/Ubuntu deal which is far more consumer focussed. This move just adds even more credence to the whole idea that Linux and Open Source are ready for prime-time.
2. If Lenovo AND Dell start banging the table of their hardware suppliers for better [and preferably Open Source] drivers, then the whole Open Source community will benefit in long run.

Overall another great news story for Open Source. Here’s the press release in full.

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Well blow me down with a feather!

It appears as though Microsoft have really shot themselves in the proverbial foot this time….

I found groklaw a few days ago which started out tracking and discussing the SCO vs IBM lawsuit, many years ago - yes it is still on going. [I knew I should have studied law]

I am not a lawyer but the contributors seem to know what they are on about and this latest twist in the tail sounds about par for the course. The “vouchers” which Microsoft bought from Novell to resell as a ‘we won’t sue you if buy Linux with one of these’ pledge have no expiry date! This means, according to Eben Moglen that:

“the minute someone turns in a voucher after GPLv3 is in effect, Microsoft will be granting a patent license to everyone, not just Novell’s paying customers”

Ooops. Or should that be OOo‘ps?

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