[1][2][3][4] The final district court ruling, on November 20, 2008, affirmed the summary judgment, and added interest payments and a constructive trust.
The appeals court remanded back to trial on the issues of copyright ownership and Novell's contractual waiver rights.
[6] On March 30, 2010, following a jury trial, Novell, and not The SCO Group, was unanimously found to be the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights.
SCO initially claimed, and tried to assert, a legal means to litigate directly against all end-users of these operating systems, as well as the companies or groups providing them—potentially a very substantial case and one that would throw fear into the market about using them.
[10][11][12][13][14] In the end, SCO launched only a few main legal cases—against IBM for improper disclosure and breach of copyright related to its AIX operating system, against Novell for interference (clouding the issue of ownership), against DaimlerChrysler for non-compliance with a demand to certify certain matters related to Unix usage, and against Linux business and former client AutoZone for violating SCO's rights by using Linux.
SCO was looking for something directed at the greater Linux community, and has since explicitly dropped all trade secret claims from their case.
In 1993, USL sold all UNIX rights and assets to Novell, including copyrights, trademarks, and active licensing contracts.
SCO claims copyright to all UNIX code developed by USL, referred to as SVRx, and licensing contracts originating with AT&T, saying that these are inherited through the same chain of sales.
The primary document SCO presents as evidence of these claims is the "Asset Purchase Agreement",[17] defining the sale between Novell and the Santa Cruz Operation.
In December 2003, SCO demanded that all UNIX licensees certify some items, some related to the use of Linux, that were not provided for in the license agreement language.
Exactly which parts of Linux are involved remains unclear as many of their claims are still under seal in the SCO v. IBM lawsuit.
SCO submitted to the court evidence of their claims under seal but much of it was excluded from the case after it was challenged by IBM as not meeting the specificity requirements to be included.
Besides the unresolved issue of what was actually transferred from Novell to Santa Cruz Operation, there are also the portions of the SVRx code base that are covered by BSD copyrights or that are in the public domain.
However, this code and the underlying standards they describe are in the public domain and are also covered by rights USL sold to The Open Group.
However, when objecting to AutoZone's request for a stay pending the IBM case, SCO apparently contradicted their written complaint, claiming that the case was entirely about AutoZone copying certain libraries (outside the Linux kernel) from a UNIX system to a Linux-based system to facilitate moving an internal application to the Linux platform faster; SCO's original complaint does not appear to mention these libraries.
Red Hat claims that SCO's statements about infringement in Linux are unproven and untrue, damaging to them and violates the Lanham Act.
These examples include code related to symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), Journaled File System (JFS), Read-copy-update (RCU) and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
The judge subsequently stated that the SCO Group had indeed made a claim of copyright infringement against IBM regarding Linux.
Novell also filed counterclaims asking the court to force SCO to turn over the revenues it had received from UNIX licenses, less a 5% administrative fee.
SCO was instructed to account for and pass to Novell an appropriate portion of income relating to SCOSource licences to Sun Microsystems and Microsoft.
[1][23] On July 16, 2008, the trial court issued an order awarding Novell $2,547,817 and ruled that SCO was not authorized to enter into the 2003 agreement with Sun.
The appeals court remanded back to trial on the issues of copyright ownership and Novell's contractual waiver rights.
[6] On March 30, 2010, after a three-week trial before Judge Ted Stewart, a jury returned a verdict "confirming Novell's ownership of the Unix copyrights.
"[49] On June 10, 2010, Judge Ted Stewart denied SCO's motion for another trial and ruled for Novell on all remaining issues.
[56] On October 22, 2009, Edward Cahn, SCO's Chapter 11 trustee, sought bankruptcy court approval for an agreement he reached with AutoZone.
On March 3, 2004, SCO filed suit against DaimlerChrysler for violating their UNIX license agreement by failing to respond to the certification request.
SCO retains the right to continue this case at a future date, providing it pays legal fees to DaimlerChrysler.
The two parties became embroiled in a bitter dispute when the Noorda family sought to oust board member Ralph Yarro III on claims of misappropriation.
[68] On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal e-mail detailed how Microsoft had raised up to $106 million via the BayStar referral and other means.
Davidson himself said that he had not expected to find anything significant based on his own knowledge of the code and had voiced his opinion that it was "a waste of time".