The open source community has collectively sighed with relief, with a federal district court judge in Utah finding that Novell, rather than the SCO Group, is the owner of copyrights related to the Unix operating system.

Ralph Yarro, the head of the the SCO Group, had maintained that his company bought the rights to Unix from Novell in 1995, and that the open-source Linux operating system was a derivative product that breeched his company's Unix copyrights.

Now that Novell has been found to be the rightful owner of the Unix copyrights, the lingering doubt about the legitimacy of Linux has been removed.

“The court’s ruling has cut out the core of SCO’s case and, as a result, eliminates SCO’s threat to the Linux community based upon allegations of copyright infringement of Unix,” said Joe LaSala, Novell’s senior vice president and general counsel told the New York Times.

The open source community has also jumped on the finding as a vindication for Linux, with James Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, telling the New York Times that this finding means that this is a "safe solution and people can choose it with that in mind".

This finding may help improve the adoption of Linux in corporate environments as some IT managers were concerned about the ramifications for Linux should the SCO Group be found to be the legitimate owner of the Unix copyrights.

A federal court in Utah ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO Group Inc., is the rightful owner of the copyright in the Unix operating system.

The ruling is a boon to the "open source" software movement and to Linux, the freely available computer operating system that has become an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

The ruling will harm SCO's efforts to claim money from installations of Linux. The decision also will aid a Novell ally, International Business Machines Corp., which has been defending a separate suit from SCO over Linux.

Novell senior vice president and general counsel Joe LaSala said, "The court's ruling has cut out the core of SCO's case and, as a result, eliminates SCO's threat to the Linux community based upon allegations of copyright infringement of Unix." He added, "We are extremely pleased with the outcome."

In 2003, SCO announced that it had determined that Linux was an illegal knockoff of Unix, an operating system originally developed by AT&T in the 1970s, and which it claimed to have purchased from Novell in 1995.

At that time, SCO filed its lawsuit against IBM, claiming that IBM had unfairly taken part of the Unix code and contributed it to the community of programmers who develop Linux.

SCO also sought to charge $700 for every computer that ran Linux, which would have made Linux more expensive than SCO's own UnixWare operating system. Several Unix-based operating systems, including SCO's UnixWare, have been hard-hit by the availability of a free Linux.

But SCO merely licensed Unix from Novell, the court ruled, in a 102-page opinion by U.S. District Judge Dale A. Kimball. The company never purchased the copyright to Unix, the judge ruled, meaning SCO probably can't sue Linux users or IBM for copyright infringement.

The judge also said Novell had the authority to force SCO to waive its claims against IBM. SCO has alleged that IBM engineers who had once worked on a joint project with a SCO predecessor improperly used knowledge they gained in later contributions to Linux.

Representatives for SCO and IBM couldn't be reached to comment.