Judge Dale Kimball’s 102 page opinion Friday in the SCO Group, Inc. v. Novell, Inc. (available here), has been widely reported on. It is a surprisingly easy read: Bravo Judge Kimball (and clerks). My comments are limited to the copyright aspects of the case.

The Honorable Dale Kimball has now ruled: there will be no jury at the trial of SCO v. Novell. He granted Novell's motion on that. He will hear it himself.

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.

Hot off the presses: Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling [PDF] on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. Here it is as text. Here is what matters most:

[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.

Here's Judge Dale Kimball's Memorandum Decision and Order, in which he sets deadlines for what's left to accomplish prior to the date the trial is set to start. You can feel as you read it just how close we are now. It's getting very real to me.

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.

"When Judge Kimball ruled against SCO in favor of Novell and said that Novell owned Unix's IP (intellectual property), that was the end of SCO. So now, SCO's legal cases are dead -- but what about its friends and partners? "

Part of what Groklaw is doing is making an historical record of the SCO litigation. Since the August 10th ruling by Judge Dale Kimball that found that Novell did not transfer the Unix and UnixWare copyrights to Santa Cruz Operation in the 1995 Asset Purchase Agreement, there has been a flurry of media coverage.

In Judge Dale Kimball's July 2008 order in SCO v. Novell, he described OpenServer like this:E. OpenServer