The soap opera known as SCO vs. Linux is about to reach its climax. (SCO also stands for Soap Creek Outfitters, makers of fine bath products.)

The ending, however, will be quiet, hidden, and seem anti-climactic.

The Register reports that BayStar Capital, which was Microsoft's "beard" in putting SCO Group up to this legal mess, is quietly buying up others' interest in SCO and preparing a takeover.

The result of the takeover, I predict, is that the legal war will quietly go away.

What's happened is that Microsoft made a top-level decision to stop warring over copyright and beef up its patent portfolio so that, in future battles, it's armed to the teeth and can go on the offensive as-necessary.

The last few years have been embarrassing to Bill Gates, I think, on several levels. Most important, the last few years have seen lawyers get rich and innovation slow down. Bill's dad is a lawyer, but a lawyer who has always known that lawyers serve the interests of business, not the other way around.

And with SCO vs. Linux and Sun vs. Microsoft, it has been the other way around.

So Microsoft is moving away from copyrights, toward patents. Patents don't provide as lengthy a protection as copyright, 17 years, and they take work to get. But the protection they offer is often deeper than what copyright offers. (This image, by the way, comes from a German Chip.De article on the next version of Windows.)

The key to these statements is here. It's a year 2000 story about how Microsoft patented its ASF file format and thus forced out of the market an ASF to AVI conversion tool, since creation of the tool required that its author "reverse-engineer" the ASF format.

Reverse engineering is said to be illegal under the DMCA, but that has been challenged in court and may yet be challenged in Congress. The right to prevent reverse engineering, however, is pretty absolute in patent law.

And, since Microsoft has the legal resources to patent everything it does (thanks to weak checks by the U.S. Patent Office) it is well-armed for the next round of the operating system wars, starting with the next version of Windows, code-named (as you can see) Longhorn. Rather than testing full-on software-driven Digital Rights Management, Microsoft will release Longhorn as a test of its patent-driven protection policy.

I predict more lawyers getting rich.