Many of you may not read about this until Monday (it’s Friday now), but in the case between Novell and SCO regarding the copyright of some UNIX code, the court ruled in favor of Novell. The ruling also (explicitly) destroys SCO’s case against IBM. The court denied SCO’s motions regarding slander, breach of contract, and other bogus claims. Lastly, SCO owes Novell a ton of money for the cross licensing deal they made with Microsoft (to be worked out later).
For those of you who don’t know, SCO started threatening companies and even sued Novell and IBM over it’s supposed mystical ownership of key UNIX source code, the foundation of the now-popular Linux. Had SCO won here, it could have been major legal black eye for the open source community, probably eliminating any major corporation from wanting to take up UNIX out of fear of being sued.
But, Novell won, and buried SCO in the process, shattering any lingering doubts that open source code is safe. I was looking forward to IBM firing its cannons too (that would have been fun). 🙁