Court Puts Muzzle on SCO

McBride quoted several provisions from the text of the 1995 agreement between Novell and SCO, which was contained in a previous SCO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, to "underscore to you the broad set of rights we hold."

"SCO owns all rights and ownership in Unix and Unixware, all versions and all copies, all updates, including Unix and Unixware source code," McBride said. "SCO owns all claims arising against any parties relating to any right, property or asset in the business of Unix and Unixware.

"SCO owns all software and sublicensing agreements, including the source code, and sublicensing agreements with OEMs, end users and educational customers. The total number of these agreements is approximately 30,000," he said, stressing this wording was pulled directly from the text of its agreement with Novell.

Explaining why SCO decided to base its initial enforcement actions on its Unix rights and not copyright infringements, McBride said the rights and reach SCO have are "broad and deep," and that while it does not rule out subsequent enforcement action taken on the basis of copyright, it elected not to do so at this point.

But SCO is coming under increasing pressure on its stance. Richard Seibt, CEO of leading Linux distributor SuSE Linux, also weighed in on the controversy this week, telling eWEEK in an interview, "I have seen the contract, and it contains specific asset exclusions." Seibt also welcomed the contents of the Novell letter.

"This is a very important development as I think we will see very soon who is right and who is wrong. They are talking about a public contract document between the two parties," he said.

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