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Ownership
A federal appeals court on Monday reversed a judge's decision that granted the copyright of the Unix computer operating system to Novell Inc.A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a judge erred in August 2007 by granting the copyright to Novell. The panel ordered a trial to determine ownership.Novell, a software and computer infrastructure company, has been locked in a yearslong legal battle with The SCO Group Inc. of Lindon, Utah, over ownership to the copyright.SCO said the ruling paves the way for resumption of the court case.SCO filed for bankruptcy protection in 2007, drained by unsuccessfully filing lawsuits claiming its software code was misappropriated by developers of the open-source Linux operating system."For us it's a case of survival, of protecting what we own." SCO chief executive Darl McBride told The Associated Press.Part of the Unix computer code, which was developed by AT&T in 1969, is used in the Linux operating system.McBride said the development and distribution of Linux has caused the company's revenues to drop from $250 million a year to $15 million, forcing the company to file for bankruptcy."There are 20 million versions of Linux running around the world," McBride said, referring to his estimate of company servers using Linux. "Linux at the end of the day is a knock off of our Unix."Novell has operations in Provo, Utah, and Waltham, Mass. A Novell spokesman did not return a message seeking comment.SCO has another lawsuit pending against IBM Corp., claiming Big Blue's Unix license for IBM's core AIX system was canceled in 2003 and IBM improperly gave away Unix source code for use in Linux.McBride said the appellate panel's ruling reinstates SCO's claims against IBM, most which had been dismissed because of Novell's claim to the Unix copyright. A message left after...
SCO rises from the dead (Computerworld)
Steven J. Vaughan-Nicholsreports that bankrupt SCO may have a buyer."I've never been a fan of horror-movie series where no matter what happens to the baddie, such as Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies, he's up and ready to kill again in the next sequel. So, you can imagine just how pleased I am to see that SCO, just when it looked like it was dead as a doornail, came up with a buyer at the 11th hour and 59th minute.According to reports on Groklaw, Gulf Capital Partners LLC, a group formed by Stephen Norris of Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners, a private-equity firm, has offered to buy SCO, just as the company faced the end of the bankruptcy road. If the deal is real and goes through, SCO's nearly dead Unix business will continue, and, oh the pain of it all, so will its zombie-like lawsuits against IBM, Novell, and other Linux companies."
SCO
Groklaw has a report on SCO's appeal of the summary judgment for Novell. It was a partial victory for SCO, remanding the issue of the UNIX copyright ownership back to the court in Utah to be decided by a jury. "The issue was whether it is appropriate to decide matters on summary judgment, and this court thought the APA was complex enough and ambiguous enough that a jury trial is more appropriate. Here's the heart of it all: 'But so long as sufficient evidence could lead a rational trier of fact to resolve the dispute in favor of either party, granting either party's dueling motions for summary judgment would be inappropriate.'" It would seem that the bankruptcy trustee for SCO, who has not yet been appointed, will get to decide where things go from here, but we haven't heard the last of this case.
Mithras Suggests Microsoft Buys Yahoo For $22 a Share
Mithras Capital, an investment fund that, poor thing, owns 1.9 million shares of Yahoo, which amounts to a fractional percentage in the company, has suggested that Microsoft buy the joint for $22 a share, these days something like a 60% premium to its bombed-out stock price, then sell off Yahoo’s Asian and non-search interests, cut costs by $3 billion and get $2.8 billion in tax benefits. read more
Is Software Installation on Linux ‘Broken’?
You know a controversy is a big one when none other than RMS weighs in with his opinion, and sure enough, that's what happened in the Mono debate late last week. "Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction," RMS wrote on the Free Software Foundation's site.
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