niq’s soapbox

If, like me, you are a lapsed groklaw reader, now could be a good time to revisit. Her latest news is that we have a big ruling: Novell, not SCO, owns the Unix and Unixware copyrights.

As I understand it, Novell only had to demonstrate that they had a reasonable belief that they owned the copyrights, so a declaration that the ownership was unclear would have sufficed for them to defeat SCO’s central case against them. But of course after years, and millions of dollars of lawyer, there’s more to it than that.

This also impacts on all the other cases:

• IBM: SCO tried to tell them to cease and desist their UNIX business because of alleged breaches of contract. Novell said that was nonsense and IBM was fine to continue. The judge has just ruled than Novell was entitled to do that. So yet more of **the** SCO case falls.
• Redhat: the whole case looks even more moot.
• The Linux end-user cases: well, does anyone remember or care about them? Even the one that wasn’t already thrown out of court.