As I read it (but IANAL), the ruling killed two things. SCO can't amend their complaint yet again. (Or, more precisely, the court ruled correctly in forbidding SCO permission to amend the complaint in October 2004.) And SCO's claim of IBM interfering with SCO's business relationships is also dead. (Or mostly so - the appeals court split 2 to 1 on that claim, so SCO could decide to appeal it en banc, that is, to the full appeals court rather than to a 3-judge panel.)
The claim that got kicked back to the district court was the claim of misappropriation of code. This is code that SCO (or the original Santa Cruz) wrote, not the original Unix code - Novell owns the copyright to that. Also, if I understand correctly, the claim is that this code wound up in AIX, not in Linux. Linux is in the clear.
Note well that this does not mean that SCO's claims have substance. It just means that this one claim has enough of a chance that it actually has to go to trial, not just be dismissed by summary judgment.
As I read it (but IANAL), the ruling killed two things. SCO can't amend their complaint yet again. (Or, more precisely, the court ruled correctly in forbidding SCO permission to amend the complaint in October 2004.) And SCO's claim of IBM interfering with SCO's business relationships is also dead. (Or mostly so - the appeals court split 2 to 1 on that claim, so SCO could decide to appeal it en banc, that is, to the full appeals court rather than to a 3-judge panel.)
The claim that got kicked back to the district court was the claim of misappropriation of code. This is code that SCO (or the original Santa Cruz) wrote, not the original Unix code - Novell owns the copyright to that. Also, if I understand correctly, the claim is that this code wound up in AIX, not in Linux. Linux is in the clear.
Note well that this does not mean that SCO's claims have substance. It just means that this one claim has enough of a chance that it actually has to go to trial, not just be dismissed by summary judgment.