Dear [x], SCO is suing you for $[y]B. Please pay before we go bankrupt.

This SCO business is getting stranger by the minute. Novell, which bought the rights to System V from AT&T, says it never granted SCO the intellectual property rights it claims in its lawsuit against IBM. If you missed our last episode, SCO is suing IBM for a cool billion. That figure was carefully calculated to reflect the revenues lost from the 11 customers that would have bought SCO Unix instead of Linux.

SCO’s hasty reply to Novell could be summarized thus: Nanny nanny boo boo. Shortly after this brilliantly strategic pronouncement, SCO’s head cheese told a reporter that his company might sue Linus Torvalds.

Compared to this statement, suing IBM seems perfectly sane. I allow that SCO’s breach of contract case against IBM could have merit. But what little goodwill SCO had left among potential corporate customers and partners is dwindling fast. Win or lose, who would do business with SCO?

If Novell really has retained ownership of Unix, IBM can have no interest in buying SCO even to keep it from buzzing around the dumpsters. More likely, all IBM has to do is sandbag until SCO runs out of money.

Finally, for those confused about Microsoft’s solo kowtow to SCO’s threat to sue everybody with a C compiler, there is a simple explanation. Microsoft sells a product called Services for Unix (SFU for short), a set of utilities, services and development tools that create a POSIX environment within Windows. Snicker if you like, but it’s not half bad. Rather than risk being the second deepest pocket in which SCO’s lawyers forage, Microsoft protected SFU. The official word is that Microsoft has no plans to do anything new with the licensed technology.

Too bad Microsoft already wrote that check. The payee line should probably have been changed to “Novell.”

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