The Sikh Geek

Groklaw is reporting that a US court has ruled that Novell owns UNIX and UnixWare copyrights. Basically SCO is Toast and is going to have to pay some serious money to Novell. So, SCO’s claims against IBM that “Big Blue” used parts of UNIX (which SCO thought it owned) in Linux is null and void. Throughtout all the years that the SCO vs IBM case has been in discovery phase, SCO has poured over the Linux Kernel source code line by line and not once been able to prove that there is any copyright or IP infringement. Groklaw is full of praise for Novell’s legal team and to be fair Novell stepped in to challenge SCO to protect Linux. It knew if it won its case, then the SCO claim against IBM would be worthless. It was a high risk strategy by SCO. It thought it would get billions of dollars from IBM but now it faces the reverse. It’s the end of SCO! If you’ve got customers on SCO Unix, I would get them migrated pretty damn quick!

UPDATE

SCO’s shares dropped today (13 August) by 71% to $0.44 per share.

I’m not sure how widely known Microsoft’s Windows Services for UNIX is, but they provide a comprehensive set of services for Windows/Unix interoperability especially when working in an environment using NIS and NFS.

Vista Enterprise (…and I assume Ultimate as well) have the Subsystem for UNIX based Applications (SUA) which apparently allows you to compile and run Unix apps using the GNU toolchain. This is not emulation, this is code running natively on Vista. Here is an article describing the opportunities in Windows and UNIX integration.