Summary: Novell and SCO continue to wrestle over the issue of costs/bills and IBM tightens its relationship with Novell

NOVELL has been fighting against SCO for its own interests (including the shareholders'). But Novell's action happens to have also been beneficial to IBM and others. Will Novell see much money coming out of it? Probably not, based on this latest post from Groklaw. It does, however, seem like Novell will keep the "UNIX" asset, which raises the company's value when it sells (maybe to VMware). It raises many questions because VMware, for instance, is run by Microsoft veterans and giving them UNIX can be deadly. From Groklaw we learn about SCO's latest objection to Novell's bill of costs:

What that means is that SCO would like to pay less. If Novell had lost, and they had been ordered to pay SCO's bill of costs, SCO would have fervently argued the opposite. Last time, SCO was able to get a bit knocked off the bill, so they may again. But they'll probably still have to pay something. But will they? In real life, I mean. Not on paper.

The SCO case remains an area that is mostly explored by this one Web site. Unless one actually attends the court hearings or downloads documents, this case is almost invisible and irrelevant by now. The SCOracle case matters a lot more [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] and Oracle even hired SCO's and Novell's lawyers. Groklaw has diversified its scope in the sense that it expanded topics it covers to include Apple and Oracle cases.

It is worth highlighting the fact that IBM still collaborates in some senses with Novell. They even present together and we last mentioned this here. Oracle, IBM, and Novell are all involved in the SCO case -- a case which was partly funded by Microsoft in order to damage GNU/Linux. ⬆

"...Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux."

--Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, key investor in SCO approached by Microsoft