I don’t know if anyone has been following the SCO/IBM lawsuit, but it took a very interesting twist today. First, a little update if you haven’t been following it…..SCO has claimed that they own the copyrights and patents for Unix System V, and that IBM (who has licensed that code base) has donated parts of the Unix code to the Linux community, and this has violated the patents and copyrights held by SCO. Basically, according to SCO, if you’re running some flavor of GNU/Linux, you’re violating their copyrights. Now, many folks in the Linux community have asked SCO to show the community what parts of their code are currently included in the GNU/Linux kernel, but SCO has not complied.

Today, in an interesting twist, Novell has claimed that they own the copyrights to Unix System V, and SCO is just a license holder. But, the twist gets even twistier–Novell also says they are happy to be a contributing member of the Open Source community, and that if code from System V has found it’s way into the GNU/Linux kernel via IBM, that’s just fine with them.

SCO has issued a response, but it really makes no sense whatsoever.

Currently, SCO looks like a idiot at best, since Novell has backed up its claims with information from the US Patent Office. Time will tell how this all plays out.

Posted on 28 May 2003