Litigation between the SCO Group and Novell over the copyright to Unix grinds slowly onwards. The Court of Appeals has affirmed that SCO must pay approximately $2.5 million in royalties to Novell, but has remanded the question of whether the copyright to Unix was passed on to SCO when the distribution rights were sold, back to the Utah District Court for retrial.

A federal court in Utah ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO Group Inc., is the rightful owner of the copyright in the Unix operating system.

The ruling is a boon to the "open source" software movement and to Linux, the freely available computer operating system that has become an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

The jury decision from the District Court of Utah ruled in favor of Novell, which could serve to end SCO's legal actions against Novell, IBM and the broader Linux community.

Last week, the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah finally granted Novell's request for declaratory judgment and ruled against SCO's last frantic attempts to keep any of its claims going. Or, to quote Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw and top expert on SCO's endless anti-Linux lawsuits: "The door has slammed shut on the SCO litigation machine."

Novell is asking the Utah District Court to set aside the earlier judgment by the Hon. Dale Kimball that Novell is not entitled to any of the SCOsource money from Microsoft or from Linux end users like EV1.

Today, the jury in the District Court of Utah trial between SCO Group and Novell issued a verdict.

A US federal appeals court overturned a judge’s ruling that granted Novell the copyright of the Unix computer OS yesterday. A panel of three judges of the 10th US circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a judge in the August 2007 case wrongfully handed the copyright to Novell. As a result the panel has ordered a “remand for trial” to establish ownership.

The judge gives UNIX to Novell, but it is worth remembering that Novell is up for sale and its assets are up for grabs

In the aftermath of federal district judge Dale A. Kimball's recent ruling, which determined that Novell, not SCO, is the rightful owner of the UNIX copyrights, the once-mighty proprietary UNIX vendor is on the verge of annihilation.