A federal judge’s ruling last week that Novell Inc., not The SCO Group Inc., legally owns the copyrights for Unix thrust the intellectual property battles begun by SCO in early 2003 back into the IT spotlight.
But several IT managers and industry analysts said this week that while the decision certainly was a significant development, they long ago stopped viewing SCO’s legal campaign against Linux backers as a real threat to users of the open-source operating system.
Some added, though, that a potentially more serious threat still exists, in the form of Microsoft Corp.’s claim earlier this year that Linux and other open-source technologies infringe on 235 of its patents.
Jon Callas, who is both chief technology officer and chief security officer at PGP Corp., said the pro-Novell ruling by U.S. District Judge Dale A. Kimball was “a small relief” for his company. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor of digital cryptography and security tools uses Red Hat Linux and Novell’s SUSE Linux software internally, and it sells server-level security products that run on a custom version of Linux.
