SCO Damages Trial Set For AprilSCO Damages Trial Set For April

A judge has set a date for a trial to determine the extent to which The SCO Group must compensate Novell for collecting royalties on the Unix operating system after it was found that Novell, and not SCO, holds the copyrights to the venerable OS.

Utah district judge Dale Kimball on Wednesday said the trial will begin April 29 in federal court in Salt Lake City. It's scheduled to last four days.

The trial was originally slated to begin in September -- but was postponed pending the outcome of SCO's ongoing Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition. However, the judge overseeing the bankruptcy case, acting on a request from Novell, recently cleared the way for the damages trial to begin.

Novell has expressed concerns that SCO is attempting to sell off assets that could be used to help satisfy its possible financial obligations to Novell.

Following a long running legal dispute between the two companies, Kimball in August ruled that Novell owns the copyrights to Unix. As a result, he further ruled that SCO must remit to Novell revenues it earned from selling Unix licenses through a program known as SCOSource.

The licenses were sold primarily to Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

The total could exceed $25 million -- more than the combined worth of SCO's current assets. SEC records showed that SCO's assets prior to the bankruptcy filing totaled about $20 million.

SCO filed for bankruptcy shortly after Kimball rejected SCO's ownership claim on Unix.