As mentioned in Groklaw the other day, SCO is getting the boot. The British technology press concurs [1, 2] and adds that "The US Securities and Exchange Commission has temporarily halted trading in SCO shares." For a bit of background: "The software company, which filed for bankruptcy in September 2007, has been hampered by legal costs and falling sales, after a US judge ruled that Novell, not SCO, was the owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights."

"AttachMSFT had been in touch with Elliott even before Elliott started hounding Novell, so it seems like this was coordinated."Novell will be sold soon (probably with federal approval in 5 days, unless regulators can stop this because shareholders sure let it slide [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]) and Microsoft must be licking its lips with anticipation and expectation of receiving Novell patents. As a bit of recap from the news: "Hedge fund Elliott Associates was successful last year in pushing Novell to sell itself for $2.2 billion to Attachmate Corp, a data center software maker owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo."

AttachMSFT had been in touch with Elliott even before Elliott started hounding Novell, so it seems like this was coordinated. It's smacks of corruption. In any case, Novell as a company is pretty much dead (almost no news about it anymore) and due to the imminent sale its report got delayed and when it was finally released it was rubbish. Novell reported very bad results which show just how much deals with Microsoft pay off and the explanations for the losses are more like excuses; it's not just due to the vulture fund (Elliott) and it's not just due to tax, either. These numbers help show that Novell's future may be more like SCO's (whose copyrights were used to harass Linux, just as Novell patents are now being passed to Microsoft, which sues Linux with patents). Shame on Novell and good riddance.

Novell expects to have BrainShare 2011 in October, but there won't be a Novell by then, unless a miracle happens. How long can Novell stay a publicly-traded company? Their employees spread libel us in the mean time. They also spread Microsoft APIs. ⬆