SCO says contract amendment shows Unix is ours

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 6 Jun 2003 at 16:49

SCO has published clauses from an amendment to the 1995 contract through which it purchased Unix from Novell, which it claims clarifies that the sale was to include copyrights and patents.

The amendment, which was made a year later in October 1996, was signed by representatives of both SCO and Novell and says that part of the original contract which described assets excluded from the transfer of Unix assets, be revised to read: 'All copyrights and trademarks, except for the copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the Agreement required for SCO to exercise it rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies. However, in no event shall Novell be liable to SCO for any claim brought by any third party pertaining to said copyrights and trademarks.'

Essentially then, all copyrights and trademarks were included in the sale according to this amendment. Novell concurs with the apparent meaning of the amendment, but denies knowing anything about it. The company said in statement: 'To Novell's knowledge, this amendment is not present in Novell's files. The amendment appears to support SCO's claim that ownership of certain copyrights for UNIX did transfer to SCO in 1996. The amendment does not address ownership of patents, however, which clearly remain with Novell.'

SCO's Chris Sontag, senior vice president, SCOsource, was more optimistic: 'This amendment simply confirms SCO's long stated position that it owns all copyrights associated with the UNIX and UnixWare businesses... Because others have called into question SCO's ownership of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights, we are satisfied that we have now proven without a doubt that SCO owns those copyrights.'

However he pointed out that the ongoing litigation with IBM is not based on the ownership of copyright, but rather is an issue of breaching contracts.

Novell added, in its response, a request that the code that SCO alleges to have been misappropriated into Linux be made public. SCO's Darl McBride said in an earlier teleconference that he had arranged to meet with Novell executives to lay before them the code in question under NDA, but the Novell folk changed their minds at the last minute and wanted the NDA removed.