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The Day After and Motion to Intervene Denied as "Wholly Inappropriate" - updated

By Pamela Jones et al.

The media is beginning to cover the Order in the SCO v. Novell trial. Here's a sampling:

• Information Week: "In a decision Wednesday, Utah District Court Judge Dale Kimball, who had previously ruled that Novell, and not SCO, owns the rights to Unix, found that SCO improperly collected Unix royalties that rightfully belonged to Novell. Kimball ordered SCO to pay Novell $2.5 million in restitution....SCO may have gotten off lightly...."
• The Inquirer: "However, Judge Kimball's ruling granted Novell only a fraction of the amount it sought at trial, which was more than $20 million. He accepted SCO's argument that its licence deal with Microsoft and its SCOsource licence sales were primarily about Unixware, although those necessarily implicated SVRX licences as well."

Remember when SCO began its media blitz? Stories everywhere. The world thought it was exciting to imagine Linux on the ropes. Now, when SCO is told it behaved improperly and must pay millions, only a few even note it. No one cares about SCO in failure, except for some who feel disgust, like Matt Asay.

What a strange ride it's been. You'd think the folks that wrote all those stories about SCO eating Linux's lunch would at least place a notice on their Corrections Page: "Um. About that lunch stuff, we were totally duped by SCO. They haven't won anything. The best they can do is not lose as big as they could have."

Wait. Hold the presses. Todd Weiss reports the SCO loss as a loss in an article titled SCO loses another round in Unix fight, must pay $2.55M to Novell in ComputerWorld:

At the beginning of its massive legal fight against Linux in 2003, The SCO Group Inc. imagined a day when companies like IBM, Novell Inc. and others would pay it large amounts of cash for alleged infringements on SCO-owned Unix code.

Instead, even as those legal fights meander through U.S. courts, the tables were turned and SCO yesterday was ordered to pay $2.55 million to Novell for collecting Unix licensing revenue from Sun Microsystems Inc. that it wasn't entitled to collect.

That is what just happened. The company that told the world they couldn't wait for their day in court got it, and they lost. And there's more to come.

Anyway, we're still here, and we're not going anywhere. I know SCO is not over yet. Don't forget, the Novell litigation was a sideshow. Covering SCO is a marathon, not a sprint. The main event is IBM, still to come. And I expect SCO to have to pay through the nose to them for what turned out to be frivolous litigation, since the Order yesterday said that SCO has made no claims about UnixWare against IBM, and it doesn't own the copyrights to what it did sue IBM over.

I see everyone notices SCO got off light, and no word yet from Novell.

Full post as published by Groklaw on July 17, 2008 (boomark / email).