Following nearly five years of FUD and barratry, Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling [via Groklaw] concluding that “Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights.” Furthermore, the court found that SCO owes Novell quite a bit of money — “[B]ecause a portion of SCO’s 2003 Sun and Microsoft Agreements indisputably licenses SVRX products… SCO is obligated… to account for and pass through to Novell the appropriate portion relating to the license of SVRX products.”

While this judgement essentially renders all of SCO’s claims against Novell moot, the battle continues in the ongoing SCO vs. IBM case. That said, SCO is suing IBM for copyright infringement. And since today’s ruling found Novell the rightful owner of UNIX IP the case against IBM is pretty much over too (it’ll be hard for SCO to win a copyright infringement suite when they don’t actually own the copyright in question).

The amazing thing is, after all this time SCO hasn’t shown any convincing evidence to back up their claims. After raising millions of dollars from Sun and Microsoft SCO had a large enough war chest to drag a baseless lawsuit out for years. I’m glad it’s (mostly) over, but it’s still frustrating that it happened at all!