Microsoft won't pursue a refund. If they sued, it
would likely require publicly divulging specifics of
the licensing deal with SCO, which in turn might
reveal that that is all that they have to rely on in
their strong-arm license deals with other players
after Novell, like Tom-Tom.
Groklaw, a wonderful website that illuminates the exciting world of IT litigation in language even I can understand, recently offered a post Novell Wins Again - Jury Rules Copyrights Didn’t go to SCO that explains that the UNIX copyrights remained with Novell and didn’t go to the SCO Group. Novell also posted about this win here. This effectively shuts down the last efforts by the SCO group (Note: the SCO Group is not SCO - the Santa Cruz Operation) to threaten users or suppliers of Linux.
What’s not yet clear is if Microsoft and Sun (now Oracle) will engage the SCO Group to obtain a refund of the licensing fees they paid early on in this adventure in litigation land.
Although I’m no attorney, I never was able to understand the SCO Group’s theory that Linux was UNIX since the two were developed at different times by different people.
I’m sure that the open source community in general and IBM, Red Hat and several others in specific are very thankful to Novell for vigorously defending its rights.
