Legal Commentary

Jury confirms Novell owns Unix copyrights – Linux remains free

By David Canton

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows:

We have not heard much about this lately, partly because a summary judgment in 2007 stated that Novell owned the Unix code.   A jury confirmed last week that SCO had not acquired the copyright to Unix from Novell in an asset purchase agreement.

The significance of this to the world at large is that Linux was derived from Unix.  SCO launched a long standing battle claiming it owned Unix, and thus had rights to certain code within Linux, and thus the right to be compensated for Linux use. 

Apparently, SCO is not yet giving up though – there is some suggestion that it might continue the fight, however futile it might be.

For more details, see this Groklaw post.

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on April 07, 2010 (boomark / email).