Novell has claimed that SCO, the US firm conducting various legal campaigns over the Linux operating system, is about to go bankrupt. In a court filing, reported this week by legal website Groklaw, Novell claimed that SCO should pay it almost all of the Unix licensing revenue it has received from Sun and Microsoft. This revenue amounts to almost $26m (£13m), and was earned by SCO when it sold Unix licences to Sun and Microsoft in 2003.
This revenue helped SCO to fight its claims that IBM violated SCO's intellectual property by including proprietary code from Unix — on which SCO claims copyright — into Linux. Novell, though, argues that it is owed that revenue. In 1995 it transferred Unix and UnixWare to Santa Cruz Operations (now SCO) under a deal called the Asset Purchase Agreement (APA). The deal also stated that SCO would hand over 95 percent of all revenue it received from SVRX [Unix System V Release any] licence agreements.
View: The full story
News source: ZDNet
11 Comments - Add comment