Via Vnunet.com -
Shares for SCO fell by nearly 72 per cent on Monday as shareholders responded to a court ruling that stated that the company doesn't own the copyrights of the Unix operating system.
At $0.44, the software firm is valued at a mere $9.4m. SCO stock peaked at $400m in 2003, shortly after it kicked off a legal campaign against Linux users and developers, claiming that the open source application had illegally used code from Unix. In a legal claim against IBM, SCO demanded billions in damages.
SCO briefly offered a licensing programme through which companies could by indemnification from any legal claims. The programme produced several million in revenues. Microsoft and Sun Microsystems respectively paid $16.8m and $10m for a licence.
The SCOsource programme however was suspended when Novell claimed that it was the legal owner of Unix intellectual property.
A judge on Friday ruled in Novell's favour, eliminating the foundation from underneath SCO's claim against IBM.
The ruling furthermore stated that SCO should have paid its Unix licence revenues to Novell.
If upheld, the latter will effectively bankrupt the organization as spent the past licence revenues on its legal case and to cover losses from its dwindling software business.
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