Grace Leong

The bankrupt SCO Group Inc. cut its total work force by 30 workers, or about 26 percent, citing an effort to reduce ongoing operating expenses. The layoffs began on Jan. 31.

SCO's fortunes began to turn after a federal ruling in August found that Novell, not SCO, owns the intellectual property rights to the Unix code, derailing SCO's efforts to profit from licensing the code. For the past four years, SCO had launched an expensive legal offensive against IBM, Novell and other advocates of the freely-distributed Linux operating system, claiming that it owned the copyrights to Unix and therefore had the rights to sell Unix licenses. SCO also claimed IBM stole code from Unix and put it into the Linux operating system.

Those claims were derailed after U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball ruled in favor of Novell and ordered SCO to remit to Novell a portion of the fees it had collected from selling Unix licenses to Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. Novell has claimed those fees could potentially amount to $40 million.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities Exchange, the company said it is cutting its work force to "continue to focus on and serve its Unix customer base and to deliver on key opportunities with its mobile products and services."