Blow back

[gdt]

Sometimes things don't follow the Grand Strategy. Such as Sun slipping SCO some money for a license Sun's says was required to open source Solaris, and incidently paying for litigation against IBM and Linux. The Grand Strategy says this is a marvellous 1, 2 punch.

But the related SCO v Novell litigation has just found that SCO had no rights it could sell to Sun -- they were Novell's rights. So Novell can accept US$2.5m from SCO to correct that "conversion" or it can accept nothing, invalidating the sale and leaving Sun with no license which Sun claimed was required to release OpenSolaris.

Doubtless we're about to see some backpedalling from Sun about just what the SCO license was for. But not too much back-pedalling, least IBM's lawyers get very upset.

Novell gets to make a very interesting choice. It has the chance to doom OpenSolaris. That sort of move could have bad PR, but Novell has already damned itself with Linux true believers anyway. Personally if I were Novell I'd be asking Sun for $2.5m and a GPL license for OpenSolaris.