SCO v. Novell

SCO v. Novell was a United States lawsuit in which the software company The SCO Group (SCO), claimed ownership of the source code for the Unix operating system. SCO sought to have the court declare that SCO owned the rights to the Unix code, including the copyrights, and that Novell had committed slander of title by asserting a rival claim to ownership of the Unix copyrights. Separately, SCO was attempting to collect license fees from Linux end-users for Unix code (that they alleged was copied into Linux) through their SCOsource division, and Novell's rival ownership claim was a direct challenge to this initiative. Novell had been increasing their investments in and support of Linux at this time, and was opposed to SCO's attempts to collect license fees from Novell's potential customers.