Published at LXer:

Back in 2007, it seemed like the SCO nightmare was done; the company had suffered a summary judgment depriving it of its claim to the Unix copyrights and it had gone into bankruptcy proceedings. In the latter half of 2009, though, SCO is still here. Now, an appeals court has ruled [PDF] that part of the 2007 judgment was erroneous and must be reconsidered; some worry that SCO could come back, zombie-like, to terrorize again. The real threat may not be SCO, though, but what comes after. The agreement between Novell and the Santa Cruz Operation was a mess which never clearly spelled out what was being sold. It is far from surprising that Novell and the company now known as the SCO Group disagree on its particulars. The lawyers involved in making that agreement, quite simply, did not do their job. Even so, the district court, in 2007, was able to obtain enough clarity from this document to conclude that there was no question at all of whether the Unix copyrights had been transferred to SCO. The result was a summary judgment throwing out SCO's claims regarding those copyrights. That judgment was welcomed in the community, but there may be justice to SCO's claim that it was a little too hasty.

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