[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.
In 2003, this would have been a huge story. By now, pretty much everyone seems to have concluded that SCO’s case was hopeless, so in some senses this seems like little more than a rubber stamp on the general consensus. It’s a legal rubber stamp, though, and it’s sort of nice to have that whole fiasco at or near a close.
For those not paying attention to Linux/SCO in 2003: in early 2003 SCO announced that they owned the Unix copyright, and that furthermore, Linux infringed on said copyright, so therefore Linux corporations owed them license fees. They made this big news by suing IBM, among others. At some point, Novell stepped in and said that they still owned the Unix copyrights, and this ruling is related to that case.
Legally speaking, I suppose there are a lot of loose ends to wind up, but as far as the end-user, home or corporate, this seems to me to be a pretty good ruling.
