I'm wondering how many nails have to be pounded into SCO's coffin before people finally just take a stake and pound one through its heart. But one of the last nails has been driven in and sealed over: SCO's lost to Novell in a way that may be, gratefully, irreversible.

The short details: SCO owes Novell upwards of $2.5 million, and SCO's claims of breach of contract, copyright infringement, and unfair competition have all been dismissed with prejudice -- meaning they can't be brought back even on appeal. There are other things they could resurrect on an appeal, but that takes money -- the one thing they probably have even less of at this point than good will or a future. SCO has been nothing but a name for a long time now, a symbol of how litigation alone is not a business model.

Groklaw, as usual, has its typically fine-grained analysis of what's going on, and debates the next moves for both parties. In Novell's case, it could continue to squeeze blood from this particular stone -- but that to me smacks of a dead horse being beaten until it's turned to glue.

To me, the biggest sign that SCO never had much of a case to begin with is how the world simply chose to move on while all this ground its way through the courts. No one I've spoken to who uses Linux in a business capacity has cited the SCO case as a reason to be worried about Linux's future. It simply wasn't a realistic prospect for them, and now that I look back on it, it never should have been. It was all hot air, and there wasn't even enough of it to fill a balloon.

It's all a sign of growing up. Open source is no longer just an eccentricity, but a serious and powerful way to engineer and distribute software. High time we all accepted this and worked with it.

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/syegulalp