SCO Successor Xinuos Asks Court to Rehear Its Claims Against IBM/Red Hat Over Project Monterey (theregister.com) 83
The long legal battle over ownership of Linux "is closer than ever to ending," reports the Register, "after a panel of three judges ruled a claim against IBM and Red Hat isn't valid, and that time has expired for further action."
In 2021, an heir to SCO settled with IBM for $14.25 million — a sum that reflects the fact SCO had for years failed to produce strong evidence to back its claims. Another of SCO's legal successors, Xinuos, filed a new claim that IBM should be on the hook because Big Blue knew it did not own the code it contributed to Linux but instead had a non-exclusive license to use it. Xinuos argued that when IBM contributed Project Monterey code to Linux [25 years ago], it breached that license.
Xinuos eventually took that argument to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York — and failed to convince it that IBM and Red Hat had a case to answer. Xinuos appealed, and on August 10th the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided [PDF] not to revisit the District Court's decision, agreeing that the original legalese governing Project Monterey means it's too late to re-litigate the matter. The Appeals Court also agreed that Xinuos tried to frame the case as a licensing issue but failed, instead arguing that the issue was really about ownership.
That ain't all, folks, because Xinuos intends to file a petition to have the case re-heard by the full bench of the Court of Appeals. That hardly ever happens, unless the court finds significant errors or major legal issues that make a rehearing worthwhile. Law firm Kaplan says the Second Circuit has allowed reviews of less than 0.03 percent of the cases it has handled. So perhaps this matter is now close to a final resolution.
Back in 2000 Slashdot interviewed one of the presidents of SCO.
Xinuos eventually took that argument to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York — and failed to convince it that IBM and Red Hat had a case to answer. Xinuos appealed, and on August 10th the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided [PDF] not to revisit the District Court's decision, agreeing that the original legalese governing Project Monterey means it's too late to re-litigate the matter. The Appeals Court also agreed that Xinuos tried to frame the case as a licensing issue but failed, instead arguing that the issue was really about ownership.
That ain't all, folks, because Xinuos intends to file a petition to have the case re-heard by the full bench of the Court of Appeals. That hardly ever happens, unless the court finds significant errors or major legal issues that make a rehearing worthwhile. Law firm Kaplan says the Second Circuit has allowed reviews of less than 0.03 percent of the cases it has handled. So perhaps this matter is now close to a final resolution.
Back in 2000 Slashdot interviewed one of the presidents of SCO.
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Weird corporate goons trying to recover the potentially billions of lost value from losing every vexatious lawsuit they've launched in 20+ years by.... doing more vexatious lawsuits.
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In for a penny, in for a pound.
Playing the lawsuit lotto, the hope is they eventually win big. I hope they win a tiny award that settles the matter while also never covering their decades of legal costs.
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Lawyers.. scamming is basically their profession.
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Jeffery Vernon Merkey? Surely by now his brilliance has made him rich enough to finally make this case a winner.
About Fsck'n time... (Score:2)
Those parasites at SCO made a living litigating BULLSHIT claims on licenses they "acquired" I hope this is the last of it. They should have DiaF years ago.
Re:About Fsck'n time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah the elephant in the corner of the room was always that SCO never even owned those rights to unix to begin with , it was licensing them from Novell and Novell where *very unhappy* with SCOs antics as the licensing text specifically forbade this sort of nonsense without Novell's go-ahead which they definitely did not give (I assume MicroFocus now have those rights since they swallowed Novell a decade ago. Actually googling it, Microfocus got swallowed by "Open Text". Who the fuck are open text?! Their wikipedia page seems to suggest they've swallowed half of silicon valley, but I havent heard of them before. I'm old :(
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"got swallowed by "Open Text". Who the fuck are open text?! "
I heard about them a long time ago, Canadian software company spun out of a project that began at the University of Waterloo.
I have no idea how they've made so much money starting out in "document management" or whatever the hell they're supposed to be doing.
Re: About Fsck'n time... (Score:2)
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Enterprise software is a horror world of deeply embedded shitshow products that only exist because their claws are so deep in equally shitshow companies that somehow a random piece of software that costs half the IT budget and nobody knows what it does will tank the entire company if removed.
Enterprise Software Rant [Re: About Fsck'n time..] (Score:2)
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OpenText operates the world's largest B2B integration and electronic data interchange (EDI) ecosystem, anchored by the OpenText Trading Grid.
It processes over 30 billion transactions annually and connects millions of trading partner relationships globally.
AFAIK, they bought up and consolidated all of the legacy EDI platforms.
Business plan
Corner essential piece of electronic processing market buying up companies who had bought up "dead" legacy companies
Maintain in place forever?
Replatform?
Profit!
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For the curious
Prompt: I am curious about the corporate mergers that resulted in Open Text owning such a large portion of EDI sector
AI Reply:
OpenText’s dominant position in the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) sector was built through an aggressive, decades-long strategy of consolidation, rolling up the largest legacy EDI networks and modern cloud integration platforms under one umbrella.
Instead of building a network organically, OpenText utilized major corporate mergers to absorb billions of transac
Re:About Fsck'n time... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Damn...Attachmate. That brings back memories of Micro-Channel PC,s and 3270 emulators.
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the sco zombie just never dies does it
I thought it moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands. If so this must be its Virgin Rebirth.
Career (Score:2)
I'm 90% kidding, but the idea cracks me up.
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Legal scammers is what they are.
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David Mirriott has been in it from the beginning. He was initially at the law firm of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, but recently moved to Latham & Watkins, but in doing so he brought along the SCO/Xinuos case with him. He presented the oral argument for IBM at the recent appellate court hearing. I think he enjoys the entertainment value of swatting down his opponents at every trun.
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Without caring enough to actually look it up, I wonder: have any of the attorneys involved have been on this case since the beginning?
Where is Darl's lawyer brother? I believe he brought up the slander of title issue which is usually about real estate not IP.
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| Where is Darl's lawyer brother?
23 years takes a toll on people. Darl McBride died in 2024. According to his obituary, he was preceded in death by his lawyer brother Kevin.
PJ must be losing her mind over this! (Score:5, Interesting)
23 years since she founded Groklaw specifically to cover this lawsuit and it's STILL not over??
WTAF??
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Does anyone actually have any evidence PJ was a real person and not just a persona created by IBM's PR department? PJ appeared mysteriously, exclusively posting stuff supportive of IBM's position in this case. They never turned their attention to any other litigation. It's awfully suspicious. You'd think a real person who knew that much about the relevant law would have opinions on other cases as well, and you'd expect them to market themselves using the fame/goodwill generated with Groklaw. You'd also
Re:PJ must be losing her mind over this! (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone actually have any evidence PJ was a real person and not just a persona created by IBM's PR department? PJ appeared mysteriously, exclusively posting stuff supportive of IBM's position in this case. They never turned their attention to any other litigation. It's awfully suspicious. You'd think a real person who knew that much about the relevant law would have opinions on other cases as well, and you'd expect them to market themselves using the fame/goodwill generated with Groklaw. You'd also think they'd have done at least one interview, or you could find at least one person who's met them. I'm not saying anything posted on Groklaw wasn't true, just that it always seemed like a very successful IBM PR exercise to me.
Her name is Pamela Jones, she was a paralegal. She's done real interviews in the past. She was/is real!
Re: PJ must be losing her mind over this! (Score:2)
Yes and her main focus battling the legality of the Copyright term extension act CTEA before the ZSconunix case reared its ugly headthat fight was lost before the Supreme Court essentially scotus said the constitution gave congresss unilateral power when it came to power. So don't think any fight is over.
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The interviews linked are all "responds to prepared questions via e-mail" type affairs. That could easily have been fielded by a team behind the name. I mean, it's possible PJ was just a very privacy-conscious person. But there's still nothing linking the PJ name or alias to an individual.
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No she's been interviewed. She's a real person. That isn't controversial. Her identity was confirmed, and thats part of why she resigned, as she did not enjoy her anonymity being lost.
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She quit after Lavabit e-mail was shut down in 2013, on the grounds that without a private, anonymous e-mail service, it wouldn't be possible to keep doing Groklaw. Can you link to the "live" interview she did, or where a journalist claimed to have confirmed her identity, or a cite a source where she said that was part of the reason for quitting? Because I remember following the whole thing, and the identity of the PJ persona was cloudy to the end.
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Why would IBM care that much about this case to create a fake PR campaign? That is what you do when you are on the SCO side, aka when you know that what you are doing is wrong so you are trying to get the peoples opinion to sway the court but for one IBM was in no such position and secondly it was not the type of case that would be fought in the public.
That she was exclusively supportive of IBM's position is because that is the only side you can be on if you know the law, every single person on the planet w
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Does anyone actually have any evidence PJ was a real person and not just a persona created by IBM's PR department?
Do you actually have any evidence that you aren't Maureen O'Gara who was hired to produce articles attacking PJ? She attempted to DOX PJ.
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I heard that a motion was filed to rename the case "Jarndyce and Jarndyce".
SCO? In 2026? Inconceivable! (Score:1)
What year is this? Itâ(TM)s so wild that SCO is still doing this same bullshit after 30 fucking years!!!!
Jesus! I know that donâ(TM)t have anything else to do, but itâ(TM)s hard to believe that thereâ(TM)s anyone at SCO that would be willing to dust off their parentsâ(TM) failed lawsuits, but apparently there is.
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Yeah, almost as old as the Slashdot "smart quote" bug :-D.
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Clearly this is simply a make-work project for interns at some law firm. And somebody's funding this.
Let's say XINUOS somehow scores a home run and proves IBM improperly contributed to Linux. The (mystery) infringing code would be written out faster than you could blink, and Linux would get a new release. XINUOS *might* be able to collect from IBM (ha!) but they won't get a penny form "Linux".
More likely the Court will tell them to go play outside.
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Let's say XINUOS somehow scores a home run and proves IBM improperly contributed to Linux.
The problem for Xinuos is even if they succeed at proving this, it means nothing legally. As the district court and the appeals court noted, Xinuos does not have standing to sue. The assets Xinuos purchased from SCO Group in 2011 specifically excluded claims related to IBM/Project Monterrey. Those claims were settled between SCO Group and IBM in 2021. Xinuos tried to argue before SCO Group's bankruptcy court that they had a stake which the court denied. The second reason is statute of limitations restricts
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The assets Xinuos purchased from SCO Group in 2011 specifically excluded claims related to IBM/Project Monterrey.
As I recall Xinuos even issued a press release stating they had no connection to the suit and could not pursue it for lack of standking
Re: SCO? In 2026? Inconceivable! (Score:2)
Literally older than my account. Just.
FINALLY (Score:2, Offtopic)
Man, when this is over, I am going to pour some hot grits into my pants in tribute to a naked and petrified Natalie Portman. Closure! :p
so this is how it works... (Score:2)
This is essentially a high-stakes gamble. The payout is potentially millions, so they just try whatever. And I bet if it all turns against them and they're forced to pay legal costs etc. they'll just file for bancruptsy.
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They'd get better odds playing Powerball.
This horse is dead, buried and fertilizing a field of corn.
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"You, boy, what's your business model?"
"We sue IBM hoping they'll pay us to go away."
(n.b. econ majors - this is not productivity)
We're obviously dealing with the undead here (Score:2)
This company just keeps getting back up out of its grave. Maybe a wooden stake is necessary.
What do they expect to gain? (Score:2)
Novell was found to be the owner of the Unix copyrights, to have the right to direct SCO to waive its claims against IBM and other Unix licensees
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
What is the actual last step? (Score:2)
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However from recent news it appears that can be followed by an appeal which can be followed by a request to reconsider the appeal
Some rulings are made by partial ("panel") courts, for expedience, and when that happens the option exists to request the same court reconsider the ruling, but with a full bench ("en banc" court). That's what's going on here. This pattern of panel/en banc rulings exists at both appeals courts and SCOTUS.
When en banc SCOTUS makes a ruling or declines an appeal, that's the end of the road: there is no higher authority for appeals. It is possible to get SCOTUS to reconsider a ruling, but such requests are
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You're either repeating what I said or getting into esoterica that isn't relevant: this isn't even on SCOTUS radar yet, and it if ever gets there, SCOTUS won't be entertaining any of the possibilities you mention: no political force in the US is going to intervene with SCOTUS on behalf of "Xinuos" et al. in our lifetimes. That's fantasy that exists exclusively in only the more demented minds of IP rent seekers.
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Some rulings are made by partial ("panel") courts, for expedience, and when that happens the option exists to request the same court reconsider the ruling, but with a full bench ("en banc" court). That's what's going on here. This pattern of panel/en banc rulings exists at both appeals courts and SCOTUS.
Stop making stuff up. There's no such thing as a panel for SCOTUS. Every case is heard en banc.
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It goes basically like this at the Federal courts level:
1. trial court in a US District Court
2. appellate court (3 judge panel)
3. En Banc review in front of the entire appellate court
4. SCOTUS certiori request / grant (if your case is refused, you're done)
5. SCOTUS hearings / decision (last possible stop on the train)
At any point, a higher court can send the thing back to a lower court to answer questions, find new facts, review with directions from the superior court, etc.
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In other news (Score:3)
The descendants of Ogg have renewed the ongoing lawsuit against the descendants of Zogg alleging that Ogg dropped a rock on Zoggs foot in a cave one fine day and it was really ouchie! Anthropologists are working around the clock trying to restore the cave paintings documenting the original complaint made to the tribal chief in 30,001 BCE.
Re: In other news (Score:2)
Yeah right, come on! That's ridiculous.
The statute of limitations ran out at 30,000 BCE.
It was never intended to end (Score:5, Interesting)
The purpose of the original lawsuit started in 2003 was never to "win" anything.
Remember that it was Microsoft who bankrolled it in the first place, and the fact that the lawsuit started in the year 2003 is no coincidence.
2004 was declared the much-derided "Year of the Linux Desktop", and it was correct; Linux had become good enough to use on the desktop in any corporation. (I've been using Linux since 1998).
Just look at the Munich Linux migration as an example.
Microsoft desperately needed some way to convince the MBAs running corporations to keep Linux off the desktop as cloud and Azure were not a thing back in 2004.
They found it in the form of legal risk; use Linux, get sued.
Back in 2003 it created quite a stir, with AutoZone and BMW being directly sued by SCO for their use of Linux.
Almost all potential corporate users got spooked, as the lawsuits got widely publicized.
A few generations of MBAs graduated learning that Linux is a legal risk, and now, even if Linux runs the entire infrastructure of most corporations, you are allowed to access it only via a text terminal.
In 2026 Microsoft has captured all the corporate e-mail market (all of it hosted on Azure by now) via some well-publicized data breaches of in-house servers at the beginning of Nadella's reign.
Most of their revenue is from the cloud, but they still want Linux off the desktop.
What people use at work will want to use at home as well.
Therefore, there will be attempts to keep this lawsuit going for as long as possible.
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Most of their revenue is from the cloud, but they still want Linux off the desktop.
MS couldn't give 2 shits about Linux on the Desktop. It's a tiny and irrelevant market share to them.
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Most of their revenue is from the cloud, but they still want Linux off the desktop.
MS couldn't give 2 shits about Linux on the Desktop. It's a tiny and irrelevant market share to them.
Not in 2003 it wasn't
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Precisely. The floodgates were about to open and they had to stop that from happening at all costs.
I saw some replies mentioning WSL and the general fact that Microsoft does not care about the desktop anymore.
Agreed, does not care about the _consumer_ desktop anymore, but the _corporate_ desktop is still a pretty serious cash cow.
I can see the difference between the Windows I am forced to use at work and the version that is available on consumer laptops.
Same with Office. If may not bring a lot of revenue d
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It's a crap argument anyway because the point was to keep Linux from becoming relevant on the desktop.
Linux (Score:2)
Most of their revenue is from the cloud, but they still want Linux off the desktop.
Microsoft doesn't care about desktops any more. They barely care about servers. There is no growth in those markets. You can run SQL Server and most of .NET on Linux now, and host the apps on Kestrel. They want you to switch everything over to Linux, then put all of that on Azure, because, even for them, Linux VMs are cheaper to run than Windows VMs.
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This was a reasonable screed two decades ago (and probably at least somewhat factual) but today Microsoft is one of the world's largest users of Linux. It has no current motivation to harm Linux and every reason to defend it.
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today Microsoft is one of the world's largest users of Linux. It has no current motivation to harm Linux and every reason to defend it.
False. As a hosting provider Microsoft doesn't care what OS people are using, they just have to host it. But as an OS provider, Linux is still competition, so they still have a reason to attack it.
.03 (Score:2)
Whenever I see something like "less than 0.03 percent", I have to wonder if they actually meant to say "less than 3 percent".
It's a 100-fold difference, so it'd be a pretty significant mistake, the difference between "1 in 33" and "1 in 3,333"
IMO, percentages aren't appropriate to use for odds less that 1 percent anyway. Humans are aleady bad enough at understanding odds, and this just makes it worse.
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This is Necrophilia.
A reminder that lawyers will fuck anything.
New coach, same game (Score:2)
They're still playing the "Try to get IBM to pay us to go away." game. It didn't work the first time around. This one's even more futile because this particular argument was dealt with during the original case and IBM proved that the code they contributed to Linux wasn't code belonging to Project Monterrey at all but completely different code IBM wrote themselves for a different product. But I suppose, given the people behind this, lack of pattern recognition skills is a given.
TSG (The SCO Group), not SCO (Score:5, Informative)
SCO, the Santa Cruz Operation, was a pretty cool company that had nothing to do with any of this crap. They sold a pretty decent x86 Unix throughout the 80s and early 90s, but ultimately were forced out of business because they found it hard to compete with the Microsoft marketing machine pushing Windows NT on one side, and free, open source Linux on the other side.
Unable to continue, they sold their Unix rights to Caldera Systems, renamed themselves Tarantella and were ultimately bought out by Sun Microsystems. It was Caldera that ultimately morphed into The SCO Group, then became a copyright troll hoping to score a settlement with deep-pockets IBM when it realized that it couldn't make UnixWare competitive either.
As we did 20 years ago, we should call the original company SCO and label the copyright troll TSG to keep them straight. They were not in any way the same company; there were no leaders or employees or buildings or anything in common.
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They were not in any way the same company
This is, of course, capitalism-worshiping nonsense. Corporations are legal fictions. Having bought one, you have become the owner of the entire fiction, including the name. They are SCO now in every sense that matters, and I say that as someone who used to run SCO software and who knows several former SCO employees. That SCO is dead, hopefully this SCO can also die soon, but they are legally the same SCO.
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They were not in any way the same company
This is, of course, capitalism-worshiping nonsense. Corporations are legal fictions. Having bought one, you have become the owner of the entire fiction, including the name..
Problem for that is they didn't buy the Santa Cruz Operation. They bought PART of it, not including the name. Santa Cruz continued on and later changed their name.
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They did no such thing. SCO Unix was, by far, the worst one. Nearly as unreliable as Windows. Just as an example, their serial port driver was so bad, you had to download an open source driver (Final Asynchronous Solution, anyone?) to get serial ports to work properly, especially if you were using a modem. And Deity help you if you accidentally started getty on a port with modem control enabled, and no modem...
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They did no such thing. SCO Unix was, by far, the worst one. Nearly as unreliable as Windows. Just as an example, their serial port driver was so bad, you had to download an open source driver (Final Asynchronous Solution, anyone?) to get serial ports to work properly, especially if you were using a modem. And Deity help you if you accidentally started getty on a port with modem control enabled, and no modem...
I used it quite a bit and found it pretty decent. I never used a modem, though, so you may be right about that.
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SCO, the Santa Cruz Operation, was a pretty cool company that had nothing to do with any of this crap. They sold a pretty decent x86 Unix throughout the 80s and early 90s, but ultimately were forced out of business because they found it hard to compete with the Microsoft marketing machine pushing Windows NT on one side, and free, open source Linux on the other side.
Unable to continue, they sold their Unix rights to Caldera Systems, renamed themselves Tarantella and were ultimately bought out by Sun Microsystems. It was Caldera that ultimately morphed into The SCO Group, then became a copyright troll hoping to score a settlement with deep-pockets IBM when it realized that it couldn't make UnixWare competitive either.
As we did 20 years ago, we should call the original company SCO and label the copyright troll TSG to keep them straight. They were not in any way the same company; there were no leaders or employees or buildings or anything in common.
Unable to continue, they sold their Unix rights to Caldera Systems, ...
It was Caldera that ultimately morphed into The SCO Group, then became a copyright troll hoping to score a settlement with deep-pockets IBM when it realized that it couldn't make UnixWare competitive either.
The rights they sold to Caldera systems were pretty minimal as they couldn't afford to buy the source code copy rights from Novell. They owned the code they produced themselves, some book copyrights including maunals. They had some rights to sell licenses and to administer existing licenses for Novell (and subject to Novell overriding them), they collected royalties for Novell and were supposed to turn over 100% of those royalties and be paid back 5% of that.
They then claimed an amendment that would tra
How time flies (Score:2)