The SCO Group is now trying to make more charges stick in its case against Novell. The only real question about this move is … what took them so long? Apparently they only just realized that (gasp!) Novell sells Linux (another gasp!).
I mean, come on, Novell selling Linux? Who knew?
Indeed, SCO threatened to sue Novell back when the word first came out that the venerable networking operating system company was trying to buy SUSE. Nothing came of it, but that was just the calm before the storm.
Later, Novell registered the copyrights to Unix, which are at the heart of SCOs case against IBM.
Novell has insisted that when it sold Unix in 1995 to the Santa Cruz Operation, the ancestor to todays SCO Group, that the deal did not include Unixs IP (intellectual property) rights. SCO, unamused, sued Novell, claiming that it, and not Novell, was the rightful owner of Unixs IP.
Personally, if I had bought an operating system, lock, stock and barrel, I would have wanted to get the IP rights at the same time.