“AutoZone’s filing was so powerful, it inspired a settlement.
Future victims of SCO’s SCOsource Silliness — and that is
obviously the hope, to ramp it up again someday if all the stars
align just right — might wish to take notes on how they did it.
Although we can’t read the confidential settlement, we can see what
inspired it, and that alone is helpful.“AutoZone, if you recall, wrote: “AutoZone denies that Santa
Cruz purchased the UNIX technology from Novell, Inc. or that SCO
acquired this technology from Santa Cruz.” But it also denied that
any of SCO’s legal rights were violated. AutoZone had licenses and
agreements with third parties, it pointed out, giving it the right
to run the code it used, or didn’t actually use but which was found
sitting on a forgotten server. It also was going to make SCO prove
that it owned any proprietary code in that third-party code SCO
challenged, such as CompX, and it pointed out that SCO failed to
register copyrights in the code it claimed ownership of, so it
wasn’t entitled to statutory damages as a matter of law, even if
its legal rights had been violated.”