On Sept. 25, IBM took its crack at ending its case with SCO by summary judgment.
Now, its Novells turn, and the company appears to be attempting to cut off SCOs lifeline to its cash reserves.
On Sept. 29, Novell filed for “partial summary judgment as to its Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Claims for Relief for constructive trust, breach of fiduciary duty, conversion, and accounting, respectively” at the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City.
These claims are not, as one might think, concerning Novells claims that it, and not The SCO Group, still owns Unixs copyrights.
Novell has claimed that neither the APA (asset purchase agreement) of Sept. 19, 1995, which transferred Unix and UnixWare to Santa Cruz Operations, nor Amendment 2 to the APA, gave SCO any copyrights to Unix.
Instead, Novell is going after the money that SCO has made from Unix.
In particular, according to Novells memo in support of its motion for summary judgment, the company wants its share of the “payments SCO received from SVRX [Unix System V Release any] license agreements that it executed in 2003 with Sun Microsystems, Inc. (“Sun”) and Microsoft Corporation (“Microsoft”).”
It was these very same multimillion-dollar payments that SCO used to fuel its lawsuits against IBM, Red Hat and Novell.