SCO GROUP CEO Darl McBride again said that UNIX "System V is in Linux" when he testified in the Novell v. SCO lawsuit on Wednesday.

McBride's statement contradicted the just prior testimony of SCO SVP Chris Sontag, as well as the company's internal memos from 2002, which concluded that SCO's own software examinations had not found any UNIX code in Linux.

Perhaps McBride was confused about which lawsuit he was in court testifying about. Whether or not there is any UNIX SVRX source code in Linux is an issue in the SCO v. IBM lawsuit, which remains stayed due to SCO's bankruptcy, but that particular issue doesn't bear whatsoever on SCO's legal spat with Novell.

Novell v. SCO has been pared down to just two issues: (1) whether or not SCO had authority to sell so-called SCOsource SVRX licences to Microsoft, Sun and others; and (2) how much of over $25 million it received for those SCOsource licences SCO improperly withheld from paying Novell as required by contract.

Or maybe Darl's so fully into his role as denouncer of alleged Linux copyright infringement that he simply cannot restrain himself from saying that whenever he speaks in public.

Or, possibly Darl was attempting to get US District Court Judge Dale Kimball used to SCO's baseless claim that Linux is an unauthorised derivative of UNIX SVRX. Judge Kimball is also presiding over the now frozen SCO v. IBM lawsuit.

This case was initially filed by SCO as a slander of title lawsuit, termed SCO v. Novell. However, since Judge Kimball had granted partial summary judgement motions last August that demolished all of SCO's claims, leaving only Novell's counterclaims for trial, the case has been informally renamed Novell v. SCO. µ

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