SCO 'disappointed' as shares plunge 70 per cent

Sue it forward

By Ashlee Vance, 13th August 2007

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Mimicking a scene from Monty Python's The Holy Grail, the SCO Group has issued a statement declaring that it's not dead yet.

Last week, a judge dealt a devastating blow to SCO's legal actions against both Novell and IBM. He ruled that Novell does in fact own the copyrights to Unix and Unixware. In addition, the judge gave Novell the go ahead to tell SCO to drop its claims against IBM and said Novell is owed some money from SCO's licensing deals.

All in all, many industry watchers pegged the decision as the wooden stake driven through the heart of SCO's ghoulish penguin hunt.

Not so, according to SCO. Probably . . .

"The company is obviously disappointed with the ruling issued last Friday," SCO said today in a statement. "However, the court clearly determined that SCO owns the copyrights to the technology developed or derived by SCO after Novell transferred the assets to SCO in 1995.

"This includes the new development in all subsequent versions of UnixWare up through the most current release of UnixWare and substantial portions of SCO UnixWare Gemini 64. Also, SCO owns the exclusive, worldwide license to use the UnixWare trademark, now owned by The Open Group.

"What's more, the court did not dismiss our claims against Novell regarding the non compete provisions of the 1995 Technology License Agreement relating to Novell's distribution of Linux to the extent implicated by the technology developed by SCO after 1995. Those issues remain to be litigated."

SCO continues to weigh its options for suing forward.

Meanwhile, SCO's stock dropped - oh - more than 70 per cent today, leaving SCOX at 43 cents per share, as of this writing. ®

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