Fatality

Rest in Peace, SCO:

"[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights."

This pretty much puts a nail into SCO's coffin, as a huge portion of their actions against Novell and IBM hinge upon the copyright question. It's a relief to me because it was decided as a matter of law, rather than a matter of fact. The difference being that matters of law are decided by the presiding judge, where matters of fact are decided by jury trial. Not that I think Novell would have lost, but there is definately additional uncertainly and length that would have gone into a jury trial on this issue. One of the other things decided by this summary judgement was whether Novell had the authority to waive SCO's termination of IBM's SVRX (unix System V) licence, which is one of the sources of the SCO vs IBM actions. The result there was that Novell did have that authority.

Lots more could be said about this, but I will direct you all to the blog which has been covering this from the start: Groklaw. I've been reading it since nearly the beginning of the lawsuit (how many years ago was it? Whoa...), and it's always been a very interesting read since I don't know a lot about law, lawsuits, intellectual property issues, and they are good at explaining those to technical people like myself.