Telecommunications

Mstar appoints new CEO -- Steve Russo was appointed chief executive of Mstar.net LLC, an Orem-based data, video and phone service provider on the UTOPIA fiber-optic network, the company announced on Monday.

He replaces Ben Gould, who stepped down from his position last month, but remains involved in the company's operations and will continue to serve on its advisory board.

Russo, who joined Mstar in January 2007 and has more than 21 years of executive management experience in finance and operations, was most recently Mstar's chief financial officer and had also served as acting president since June.

Technology

Novell issues statement on licensing fee dispute with SCO -- Novell Inc. on Monday issued a statement about last week's federal ruling in which the SCO Group was ordered to make $2.6 million in restitution to the Waltham, Mass. software developer.

That restitution amount is significantly lower than the $19.9 million Novell sought for what it called "unjust enrichment" by SCO because it collected royalty payments on Unix licenses from Sun Microsystems and other Linux users of Unix software without Novell's approval and allegedly refused to account for them.

U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball, in a ruling issued last Wednesday, found SCO "breached its fiduciary duties" to Novell by failing to account for the revenues SCO received from Sun for rights to opensource its own version of Unix products called OpenSolaris. That Unix product is based on the SVRX code, which Kimball on Aug. 10 determined Novell to be the owner.

"We think this is great news for Novell and for the open source community. We're very pleased this ruling reaffirms and strengthens Novell's ownership of the UNIX SVRX copyrights and vindicates Novell's continuing efforts to protect the open source community from SCO's claims," Novell said in Monday's statement.

"This ruling underlines the court's earlier decision, issued in August 2007, which found that Novell, not SCO, owns the copyrights to UNIX SVRX code, and further undermines SCO's claims against Linux users," according to the statement. "We see a pattern in the legal judgments made in this case: Decision after decision makes it clearer and clearer that SCO's legal claims against Linux have no merit."

Real Estate

Lindon distribution services firm to relocate to SLC -- Erik Scott Media LLC, a Lindon provider of procurement, fulfillment, assembly and distribution services, is relocating to a larger location in Salt Lake City.

The 22-worker company is leasing 43,000 square feet of space, about three times its current Lindon location, at 3505 W. California Road in Salt Lake City. Erik Scott's new office will be located within a 175,000 square-foot Class A industrial building that's part of the Majestic Airport Center, located five miles from Salt Lake International Airport.

The new location will help facilitate the company's planned rapid growth during the remainder of the year, according to partner Mike Schatz. Another 30 to 40 new workers may be hired in the coming months.

"The Majestic facility is very close to some of our largest customers," Schatz said. "We are also pleased to have much better access to the airport which benefits the distribution side of our business."