Since 2003, SCO has been fighting bigger and bigger enemies in hopes of enforcing its UNIX patents. Well, a judge has just decided the SCO has no hold on UNIX patents and that Novell owns all of them. The graph you see here is what happened to their stock price when the news hit.
SCO makes and sells nothing of any interest. Their M.O. thus far has been simple — enforce dubious patents on UNIX and Linux and bet on the big money that is sure to follow. With this decision, however, their days are numbered.
“Although the district judge ruled in Novell’s favor on important issues, the case has not yet been fully vetted by the legal system and we will continue to explore our options with respect to how we move forward from here,” the company said in a statement.
Press on all you want, guys. Your business model is dying.
UPDATE – I’m a big moron. This is mostly about copyright. Cory “Patent Monkey” Sorice writes:
This is actually a copyright issue that SCO claimed was wrongly copied by IBM to create Linux from Unix in a 2003 suit on property where SCO claimed to have bought he code for Unix from Novell in 1995. Given this ruling, Novell can force SCO to shut down the case, though, IBM may have other obligations to SCO on that failed JV.
All in all, good news for the FOSS folks, very bad news for SCO as the share price shows.
Isn’t Linux about sharing? At least SCO doesn’t appear to have a leg to stand on to continue its fight.
In a related story, VMWare IPOs today with controversy of potential Linux copyright concerns. VMWare from Slashdot
Just a friendly note suggesting you replace “patents” with “copyrights”. They are quite different.
“SCO makes and sells nothing of any interest.”
That’s actually quite false. Since you are only 14 you may not understand that SCO UnixWare is quite stable, has a long history, and provides some interesting features. The issue is that instead of improving their business and competing on features they embarked on a strategy of suing everyone and their auto company. The result is that the entire business suffered. Its now just a shell that will no doubt go bankrupt soon.
Can we have a judgment ordering SCO to pay all of Novell’s legal fees? That would make me feel better.
I wonder how long it will be before we see the ramifications of this decision on other companies that have resorted to the “sue for revenue” business model.
Jon