SCO, Novell relationship tangled in suit with IBM

Does The SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX) have a non-compete agreement in place with Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL)?

SCO believes it does. Novell believes SCO does not.

And if there is a non-compete agreement in place between the two firms, could such an agreement be used to scuttle Novell's proposed $210 million acquisition of SUSE LINUX, either before or after the fact?

These were just a few of the interesting tidbits to come to light in the past week and a half while the majority of the technology world was focused on Fall COMDEX 2003 in Las Vegas.

SCO, you'll remember, used to be known as Caldera Systems.

In August 2000 Caldera acquired the SCO Server Software and Professional Services divisions from the Santa Cruz Operation, the leading provider of UNIX operating systems at the time. (Santa Cruz Operation had acquired UNIX from Novell back in September 1995, which in turn had acquired UNIX when it bought Unix Systems Laboratories from AT&T in June 1993.)

Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group in August 2002.

Beginning in January 2003, SCO began selling its SCOsource license to provide UNIX System Shared Libraries for use with Linux. SCO Senior Vice President Chris Sontag also stated at the time that "SCO would help customers legitimately combine Linux and UNIX technology to run thousands of applications."

SCO also announced in the same release it had retained the services of David Boies of the law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner "for research and protection of SCO's patents, copyrights and other intellectual property."

Two months later SCO opened what has become a growing legal brouhaha in both the Linux and open source communities by filing a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM (NYSE: IBM) for "misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract."

In essence, SCO claimed that IBM had violated its licensing agreement for SCO's UNIX by transferring UNIX code into Linux.

IBM has since countersued SCO, SCO has upped the ante on its lawsuit against IBM to $3 billion, and leading Linux provider Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) has filed a preemptory lawsuit against SCO to prevent it from making "unsubstantiated and untrue public statements attacking Red Hat Linux and the integrity of the Open Source software development process."