The long six-year legal saga of The SCO Group Inc. was recharged a bit last week when an appeals court overturned four critical August 2007 rulings that had seemingly put the brakes on the company's legal case against Novell Inc.

When a U.S. District Court judge in Texas ruled that Microsoft had violated an XML-related patent held by i4i, a small Canadian company, the verdict seemed to potentially threaten both Microsoft and the open-source community.