Friday, 12 January 2007

Novell Says in Court Filing that SCO Owes It Millions

SCO, a developer of small/mid scale Unix server OSs and business system software for network computing, has been in tough patch lately with rumours of its possible bankruptcy making the rounds. The allegation against the company is that it could not pay USD 26 million in licensing fees that it received from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, to Novell. This was a requisite SCO had to conform to due to terms of a purchase contract SCO had with Novell.

"For SCO, bankruptcy is inevitable; it characterises its assets as merely those 'remaining' and does not rebut Novell's arguments that its bankruptcy is imminent," according to the Novell filing.

SCO sent shock waves in open source world in 2003 when it filed a USD 1 billion lawsuit against IBM claiming the latter company's contributions to Linux violated SCO's intellectual property rights to Unix. After Novell argued it was the rightful owner of Unix, it was sued by SCO.

SCO pay Novell, claiming that the revenues from Microsoft and Sun don't fall under the APA.