Everyone knows by now but here are my 2 cents on this subject:
This last Friday was a good day to Novell and Linux.
Federal Court Judge Dave Kimball issued a ruling stating among other things but most importantly “that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights”.
This pretty much eliminates SCO’s threat on it’s allegations of copyright infringement of Unix by the Linux community.
Additionally, the Court decided that SCO owes Novell some money made for the licensing deals with Sun and Microsoft. There goes SCO’s cash reserves.
Last but not least, Judge Kimball states this ruling “significantly impacts the claims and counterclaims asserted” in the SCO vs IBM case.
I’m eagerly awaiting on how this one ends 
SCO is expected to appeal nonetheless, but a dead end appeal I’m afraid. Well, I’m not, really hopping to hear the fat lady singing 
Now, what happens to SCO’s Unix licensees? According to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols Sun should be running to a telephone and callling Novell trying to make a deal. Humm, I don’t see things that bad for Sun. Sure, Sun is a direct competitor on Novell’s Linux with Solaris and OpenSolaris, not on licenses per se but on support contracts. But Sun is gaining momentum in the marketplace with it’s Open Source initiative and I think Novell pretty much knows what the Open Source Community feels and does when Open Source is attacked in any way, that must be really clear and fresh before thinking on enforcing it’s IP against Sun.
Microsoft on the other hand has been close with Novell recently so there too I don’t see anything really happening. Still, now there’s more leverage on Linux’s side against those alleged claims of Linux infrigment of Microsoft’s Intellectual property.
On a side note, I’m wondering if Apple’s decision to go with BSD as base to Mac OSX was just technical. What do you think?
Image from Bill Stearns’ web site.
