The software company SCO Group
Inc. has been involved in so many lawsuits, than it should barely have any time
for creating and developing its products! However, on the 10 th of
August 2007, one of SCO Group’s battles has been finalized. At least for the
moment, the case of SCO v. Novell has reached to an end thanks to Judge Dale
Kimball’s ruling that “Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare
Copyrights”.
But SCO has said through a short
statement from its web site that although the company is “obviously
disappointed” with the Judge Dale Kimball’s ruling, this would not mean they
lost the war. SCO has drawn everybody’s attention that there have still
remained parts of the case that haven’t yet been resolved. The company has then
hinted that it might as well file an appeal against the Friday’s court ruling.
SCO Group’s legal war has started
about four years ago, when at the beginning of 2003 the company claimed some
“secret segments” of code had been misappropriated from its UNIX System V code
into Linux. SCO would soon sue IBM in a $1 billion trial, as the company was
being accused by SCO of transferring trade secrets into Linux. And that was
just the beginning of the war, which triggered many other claims, litigation,
threats and lawsuits. By the end of 2004, SCO had already filed its four major
suits (against IBM, Novell, DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone). Red Hat and IBM have
also counter-sued SCO. Linux developers, as well as Linux users, have been also
publicly accused by SCO of committing copyright infringement.
But all in all it seems that
after all these years SCO has finally lost one of the must important battles.
Even if the company does file an appeal against the Friday ruling, what will
its chances be to eventually win against such powerful companies as Microsoft,
Novell and all the others?
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