Earlier this week, after the US Courts ruled that Novell owned the copyrights to Unix, Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry -- trying to reassure the Linux community about Novell's good intentions -- proclaimed that Novell is "not even in the Unix business any more."

If they're not in the business, then that means the copyrights are essentially worthless to them. There are however at least three big players still in the Unix business: Sun, IBM, and HP. There's several smaller players in the business, but really no one else worth mentioning.

After Sun's agreement with IBM yesterday, and some of the future hints that IBM mentioned, there may within a reasonably short period be only one major player in the Unix market... Sun. So, is there an opportunity for Novell to sell all rights to Sun? And, if so, could Sun then accelerate the open sourcing of Solaris by having fully unencumbered rights?