With that being the case, and there being no chance whatsoever of SCO successfully pursuing a Linux lawsuit, I strongly suspect that the Trustee will drop all of SCO's lawsuits and spend his time on rendering down SCO's remains into pennies on dollars. Rationally, there's nothing left to do, and with a reasonable person now in charge of SCO's remains, that's what I expect to happen.
As you know, Darl McBride testified at trial in SCO v. Novell that he always files truthfully with the SEC, so you can take this to the bank: "...the Chapter 11 Trustee will have authority over the Debtors’ assets and affairs and the future course of the Debtors’ litigation against Novell, IBM. et al." So that is who speaks for SCO now.
The trustee is going to get serious about settling those cases. But, the trustee has very little if anything to offer in settlement. Novell and IBM are not going to be interested in paying any money at all either. They know they can afford to litigate those issues. And they know (as does now the public) what the facts are. Well funded companies do not fear litigation. Bankrupt companies run by a trustee have almost no chance. The trustee is just not going to go out on any limb. And that may be true even if the case is a slam dunk. And we are not there folks. This is a losing case for SCO even if they had plenty of money to proceed through the litigation. And they do not have that.
I would say that Novell is sitting in the cat-bird seat. And that is true no matter what the old SCO management might say about vindication, etc. They are not vindicated at all. At best they are getting the trial they claimed they wanted but hoped to no end they would not have to take. Ask the trustee about vindication. He or she is going to be more worried about being paid for the time to close up this company. Creditors want to be paid. And the only assets that can be sold for cash are needed to settle the pending lawsuits. And SCO does need to either settle the lawsuits, prosecute them at great expense or suffer from a default judgment entered against them.
And to think you thought you wanted to be the trustee?
At this point, I'm not sure if it matters who owns Unix. It might not matter who holds the copyright, the license, or the original source code. Why does it not matter, you ask? In the Linux perspective, Linus wrote the Linux kernel off of Minix and publicly available code--plus original code of his own.
A federal appeals court overturned a lower court ruling that Novell owns the copyrights to UNIX, giving SCO a glimmer of hope in its long-running legal battles. But the bankrupt litigation machine still owes Novell over $2.4 million, and a bankruptcy trustee is now calling the shots.
Microsoft joined the fray shortly thereafter, agreeing to license Unix code from SCO and then using the association to fuel confusion over open source licenses and the liability they could carry for corporate users.