No one talks about SCO because SCO never had a claim to begin with. Their claim was that linux was ripped from a particular variation of unix. The fact is that the variation of unix was taken from prior art in earlier versions of unix. Linux was built on the original unix, not the one SCO had the patent on. Their claim was bunk from the beginning.
This one, however, is very different. They have had two commercial products, they have a patent on the unique arrangement (and no, the 1911 arrangement is NOTHING like this one, the ergonomics are vastly different, and its no ambidextrous). You can SEE the similarity.
Not earlier versions of Unix. No.
System V Unix code was not taken from a prior art. It deviated so radically from it that the world of Unix was ever after split apart. One school of thought evolved into BSD (BSDish), and the other System V (AT&Tish). Novell's licensing for system V Unix was a proper acquisition of the ancestral AT&T rights, and SCO's understanding was that they acquired these rights from Novell.
It theoretically provided them with ironclad ownership of System V Linux.
How iron-clad? SCO/Caldera Darl McBride launched their suit quite confidently. SCO's share values rose sharply on speculation as well as through Millions of real Dollars in cash infusions from groups as significant as the Royal Bank of Canada; and this despite no real cash flow prospects outside of their pending legal action. A miserable EBIT and a worse PE ratio.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-132306.html
Posted on ZDNet News: Oct 20, 2003 9:09:00 PM
BayStar Capital entered the open-source spotlight last week with its $50 million investment in the SCO Group, which is embroiled in legal wrangling over Linux and Unix with IBM and Red Hat. What the companies didn't say so loudly, though, is that $30 million of BayStar's investment in SCO was from the Royal Bank of Canada, according to a Thursday regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. BayStar itself invested the remaining $20 million.
BayStar invests in publicly traded companies with a mechanism called a PIPE--private investment in public equity. While Microsoft has used PIPEs in the past, a BayStar representative said Microsoft apparently hasn't ever participated in a BayStar PIPE and certainly didn't participate in the SCO investment.
There was a real groundswell of brilliant people iteratively comparing code pools from release to release. But plausible defenses became largely irrelevant because Novell successfully won a summary judgment against SCO in which they claimed that Novell had never relinquished the rights.
Novell later expressed that they agreed with the community position; essentially that although it follows System V operating concepts there is no plagiarism of code, and made their intention no to peruse any legal recourse against users of System V. They were not as magnanimous with SCO.
The court issued an order awarding Novell $2,547,817 and ruled that SCO was not authorized to enter into the 2003 agreement with Sun
The ending was... messy.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/01/sco_shares_down/
Posted in Financial News, 1st December 2006 18:59 GMT
SCO Group shares went south in a hurry during Friday's trading, as investors reacted to the company's legal misfortunes.
SCOX dropped 40 per cent to $1.20 per share, at the time of this report. That's well off a 52-week high of $5.23 and light-years away from the more than $20 per share price SCO enjoyed a couple years back. The share price collapse follows a judge's decision to uphold an earlier ruling that nixed 187 of SCO's 294 claims against IBM.
$20 a share. Clearly, not everyone thought it was a hokey case.
So what's the point?
Well, if its possible that you are wrong on the facts of a settled case then it is also possible that you are wrong on the facts of an pending case. Don't sweat it. I can't possibly know SFA regarding the validity of RA's claim as I am not privy to any real details. Nor would I claim to be.
Like everyone else, I am in the same boat.
It remains to be presented by expert witnesses from both sides how identical or different the mechanisms in question are in the RA suit.
But I do stand by what I said earlier.
1) The onus will be on Robinson Arms to prove that the patent was violated, and there is more than one way to establish a defense. It they are in the right, they deserve compensation and will likely find it.
2) Irregardless of the legal outcome, there is a lot a company figurehead can do to permanently screw up his company's reputation through repeatedly negative interactions with the user community.
In the meantime, we shall see.
Guess they are really going to pull a ARMS type of business plan in that case. 
