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If IBM wins everything this will have cost them over $1Billion. SCO should be made to put up its ownership of Unix V to insure the SCO can pay counter-claims. It should be done to prevent SCO from going bankrupt to avoid paying IBM.

First of all, thank you for placing this article.

However, I have a note about an incorrectness withing the article. It concerns this part:
“SCO claims that all Unix code developed by Unix System V licensees should be considered a derivative of Unix System V according to its reading of AT&T Corp's original licenses. IBM disagrees and previous Unix System V owner Novell Inc supports its view.”

Several independent contract lawyers who have studied the contract between Novel Inc. and the original SCO (now known as Caldera Systems) and between Caldera Systems and the Santa Cruz Operation (now known as The SCO Group), have clearly concluded that the copyrights of Unix System V were not amongst the thing being transferred between the companies. The original SCO, in essence, has bought the sales devision of Unix System V including full access to it's resellers network from Novel. However, Novel retained the copyrights and therefore the ownership of Unix System V and also a large portion (I believe it to be about 95%) of all revenue generated from Unix System V.

Besides the dispute about derivative works, The SCO Group Inc. actually is in no position to even dispute it derivative works at all, for they do not own Unix System V (contrary to all their PR statements). As this case drags on for more than 2 years, it has become pretty clear to most independent sources that have closely followed this case from the beginning, that this case is brought up by The SCO Group mainly to facilitate some agenda that has not much to do with anything covered by the case itself. Possibly not even with anything to so with the The SCO Group itself. Terms like “gaming the legal” have been brought up quite often in relation to the case.

For more technical information about the assets transferred between Novel Inc. and Caldere Systems, and subsequently The SCO Group, all contracts can be accessed from the Groklaw web site (http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20050109113517336) which covers the whole SCO vs IBM case in detail.

Thank you for your comment Elwin.

With all due respect to any independent contract lawyers out there, until the judge hearing the Novell case (or a jury) decides precisely what was or was not transferred from Novell to the Santa Cruz Operation (and then on to SCO Group) I will be remaining impartial when it comes to the question of who owns the Unix copyrights.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion on the rights and wrongs of SCO's case, of course, but having researched the contracts myself and read the analysis at Groklaw (and others) my honest opinion is that I just don't know whether the contracts transferred ownership of the Unix copyrights or not.

In June 2004 Judge Dale Kimball wrote: "There is enough ambiguity in the language of Amendment No 2 that... it is questionable whether [it] was meant to convey the required copyrights or whether the parties contemplated a separate writing to actually transfer the copyrights after the 'required' copyrights were identified".

But he has also twice rejected Novell's request for a summary judgment that it retained the copyrights to Unix and UnixWare, having concluded that the arguments about the agreements would be more properly heard on potential later motions for summary judgment or trial.