For me, the most confusing action of all the SCO legal actions (SCO v the rest of the world) is the one with Novell. I mean, I have little understanding of contract law in this or any other area, but I would have thought that when a company buys software from another company it’s kinda done along the lines of buying/selling a car. It was yours, now it’s mine – all of it.Not so, at least according to Novell, in the case of Unix. In its latest filing, Novell is countersuing SCO and demanding that the money SCO gained from licensing Unix System V to Sun and Microsoft be put in trust (to prevent SCO spending it) until the ownership of Unix is resolved. Novell maintains that it owns Unix copyrights and thus has a right to the money.

Novell may be correct or it may not – that’s up to the courts – but one has to wonder at the competence of the deal makers involved, if who got what from the deal wasn’t actually clear. As fate would have it, the two companies involved in the action (now) are utterly different from those that made the deal (then). In 1995, when the deal was made, SCO really was the Santa Cruz Operation located in Santa Cruz, to be acquired in 1998 by Caldera Systems (a Ray Noorda company that was actually distributing Linux by 1998). In 1995, Linux was only a rumor and Linus was the name of a character in Peanuts. In 1995, Novell, also a Ray Noorda company, was unable to do much with Unix and was living in the shadow of the newly emerging Windows NT.

By 2003, a complete reversal of roles had taken place. Novell acquired SuSE and became an Open Source friendly Linux distributor, while Caldera Systems (now renamed as SCO) stopped distributing Linux and started distributing law suits. One wonders which side of this Ray Noorda was on.

In any event, if Novell is correct, SCO has no case and is heading for the scrap heap in a startling way.