SCO Owes Novell $2.5 Million

CrkHead writes "Groklaw has posted Judge Kimball's ruling on SCO v Novell. For those that have been following this saga, we finally get to watch the house of cards start to fall. For those new to this story, it started with SCO suing Novell and having all its motions decided in summary judgement and went to trial only on Novell's counter claims. Cheers to PJ for keeping us informed!"

hmmm,

[apodyopsis]

So Novell get $2.5m instead of $20m, does this mean SCO may survive this?

"Importantly, the court ruled that Novell has no right to any royalties from UnixWare or OpenServer sales by SCO, which is where the bulk of SCO's revenue is earned," SCO said in the statement. "This is also an important step forward in the capitalization and reorganization plan for SCO that will allow us to emerge from Chapter 11. We continue to disagree with the premise of this trial and believe that Novell is not owed anything, but that they have interfered with SCO's UNIX rights."

From their statement they seem relatively upbeat on what must of been a bad day for them.

It hints that Novell owns the SVRX code that SCO sold to MS - does this mean that MS will now sue?

Interesting times...

Remember though, there are multiple lawsuits

[jonwil]

The first series of lawsuits by SCO are the ones that are to answer the question of whether linux, BSD or contain code from the real UNIX code (i.e. code originally created by AT&T)
The second set of lawsuits (mostly being fought between SCO and Novell) is to answer the question of who owns the UNIX copyrights, who has what rights to them and which of the deals done over the code are valid and which aren't as well as who owes who how much money

Nothing says says cheers to PJ like......

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Nothing says says cheers to PJ like donating to help her keep the site running! Left side, your choice, Paypal or Amazon. Just sayin.....

Not per se

[Anonymous Coward]

What the judgment does is to set the amount of money SCO owes to Novell. That information goes into the bankruptcy.

An important detail is that the money SCO owes Novell was never SCO's. SCO was handling the money as an agent. It was always Novell's money. Judge Kimball ruled that SCO had breached its fiduciary duty and had unjustly enriched itself. If I understand correctly, that means Novell gets its money and then the other creditors get to fight over what's left.

The other thing that many have pointed out is that Novell will probably be awarded their lawyer fees. That amount will far eclipse the money Kimball has ruled on so far.

Novell *does* own the code...

[rkhalloran]

The ruling that sent the SCOundrels into bankruptcy court last year confirmed that the deal Caldera inherited from Santa Cruz Operation did *NOT* transfer copyrights from Novell, just gave rights to develop new code from it (i.e. Unixware) and act as Novell's collection agent on existing licenses. The current management (using the term *VERY* loosely), seeing their x86-UNIX business sinking, sued their former development partner, IBM, assuming they'd get a quick payoff to shut up and go away. Big surprise when IBM unleashed their lawyers right back at them. The present fiaSCO has ensued, only getting better when they tried to sue Novell for actually claiming the copyrights SCO was trying to use, which led to today's ruling.

SCOX DELENDA EST!!

Re:Money comes from where?

[Anonymous Coward]

Theoretically, SCO does have a couple of million left, and SCO should have to pay Novell. Since this is not a judgement of debt owed, but of conversion of Novell's money, Novell should be in front of the line and get their money before the others split up the remaining. Delaware jurisdiction makes this less likely, though.
It may be possible to go after the company executives, but not the stockholders, who have lost their entire investment already, anyway.

So what does Laura DiDio say?

[Mark_in_Brazil]

What I really want to know at this point is what the oh-so-knowledgeable and unbiased expert analyst Laura DiDio has to say about this. After all, she had seen code snippets that made her come away thinking SCO really had a strong case. Later she said that "you'd have to be really crazy to try and sue IBM if you didn't have something."
Since she has also claimed "these people" (people involved with Linux) are "living in an alternative reality," I'm curious about Ms. DiDio's views on reality today.

Of course, I have to admit that Ms. DiDio, renowned IT expert with no IT or computer science training, does know something about "living in an alternative reality [go.com]" (Ms. DiDio's part comes at the top of the 2nd page).

Appeal Bond

[OmniGeek]

I believe they are required to deposit an appeal bond in the amount of the judgment before they are allowed to appeal. They may still be able to manage that, but it's most likely going to be a matter for the bankruptcy judge...

Re:Money comes from where?

[u38cg]

Erm, no. That's the whole point of being a public limited liability company: in exchange for capping your liability to what you invested, you have to open your company up to a certain level of scrutiny.

Re:hmmm,

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't introduce new facts in an appeal. An appeal challenges incorrect procedure and re-evaluates the already-established facts of the case.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

appealing?

[Crispy Critters]

It seemed that the judge made it quite clear that he was tilting the ruling in SCO's favor. He explained precisely why he was legally compelled to determine the dollar amount in a way that was favorable to Novell (agency, burden of proof, blah blah blah). But then he turned around and pulled out a dollar value that was generous to SCO. It was practically a roadmap to Novell showing how they could get millions more if they appealed (not that they are likely to receive a penny anyway). I read it that he was sending a message to SCO that if they appealed they would be most likely to lose significantly more money.