Stories about: The SCO Group

The start of a scheduled trial between The SCO Group and Novell has been postponed indefinitely because of SCO's just-announced Chapter 11 bankruptcy and reorganisation.

With its cash reserves running out, the SCO Group has filed for bankruptcy protection.

With its cash reserves running out, the SCO Group has filed for bankruptcy protection.

For most of his career in the IT industry, Darl McBride was a largely unknown executive working at Novell and several other companies. But nine months after he joined The SCO Group as its president and CEO in June 2002, McBride's name became a household word in the IT world. That's when Lindon, Utah-based SCO filed a US$5 billion lawsuit against IBM, alleging that it improperly contributed some of SCO's Unix intellectual property for use in Linux.

A patent-infringement lawsuit filed by Network Appliance against Sun Microsystems on Wednesday could escalate beyond the storage arena to become this decade's major test case for ope- source software, according to storage analysts.

A federal judge's ruling over a week ago that Novell, not The SCO Group, legally owns the copyrights for Unix thrust the intellectual property battles begun by SCO in early 2003 back into the IT spotlight.

If The SCO Group's future looks grim, CEO and President Darl McBride apparently hasn't gotten the memo. In a letter to partners and customers filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, McBride said SCO is still committed to doing business as usual even after the company was dealt a crushing blow in its ongoing litigation over Unix copyrights.

Now that it has scored a major win for Linux in its legal battle with The SCO Group, Novell has no interest in becoming like the company it's just defeated and won't mount any copyright-infringement claims over Unix, a spokesman said Tuesday.

Sometime before March 2003 The SCO Group decided that making products that people might want to buy was passe and decided to get into the "business" of filing lawsuits instead. Their first target was IBM but they soon expanded their scope to take on the entire open source community and scores of businesses actually trying to do things that benefited society. It's been a long road since then but the end is now in site - the end of The SCO Group that is.

The SCO Group acknowledged being dealt a significant blow Friday in its lawsuit against Novell but it indicated that it may not be done fighting yet.

Novell won a significant ruling in its lengthy battle with The SCO Group on Friday.