SCO's return blocked by court

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 7 Aug 2009 at 11:03

SCO's plan to exit bankruptcy and continue its legal fight with IBM and Novell has been put on ice by a federal judge.

SCO planned to sell off the majority of its Unix business to a company called Unxis for $5.25 million, leaving only its mobile applications business.

The company then planned to use this money to exit bankruptcy and pursue its lawsuits against IBM and Novell, which it claims are infringing its Unix SVRX copyrights.

The plan was slammed by US bankruptcy court judge Kevin Gross who claimed SCO was "betting the company on the litigation", which would become SCO's "sole businesss" if the Unix assets were sold.

Instead, Gross ordered a trustee take control of SCO and evaluate the company's best chance of exiting bankruptcy. The trustee will also be tasked with evaluating SCO's chances of winning its long-standing litigation.

The SCO saga has been running since 2003 when the company launched a lawsuit against IBM, claiming Big Blue infringed on its intellectual property by including code from Unix in Linux.

It emerged that, having bought the Unix trademarks from Novell a decade before, SCO assumed it also owned the rights to enter into open-source licence deals with Sun, as well as other end-user firms.

A judge ruled that Novell, rather than SCO, owned the Unix copyrights. Novell is now pursuing SCO for a share of the license fees SCO received from licensing Unix to Sun and Microsoft. The decision plunged SCO into bankruptcy in 2007.