Grokking SCO's demise

So when Judge Kimball ruled this month that Novell, not SCO, owns the copyrights to Unix, we know he eliminated the basis for SCO's copyright claims against IBM, Red Hat and AutoZone, too. (DaimlerChrysler went to court in 2004 and demolished SCO's lawsuit against it with a different set of arguments.)

And when the judge ruled that Novell has the right to quash any lawsuits based on Unix licenses, we know he gutted what remained of SCO's legal threats.

We even have a good idea of how likely SCO is to successfully appeal. (The odds aren't good.)

But those rulings weren't much of a surprise, either. Once documents in the lawsuits started to pile up, it was possible to draw hard conclusions based on the evidence presented to the court, rather than public-relations bluster.

Which explains why so many analysts were able to tell their clients there wasn't much legal risk to worry about with Linux -- and tell them that literally years before the hammer finally fell on the litigation.

All thanks to the Grok­law crowd's desire to pile up every suit-related document they could find.

Did Groklaw really have an impact on those court cases? Naaah. The impact was on the rest of us. That collection of documents gave SCO's suits a transparency that's impossible to come by with most IT industry litigation.

And we need it. It's tough enough to make IT decisions based on vendor claims, technology promises and user requirements. Lawsuits just muddy the waters more. Anything that helps provide a little more clarity is good news.

For that, we all owe Groklaw thanks.