Supreme Court: We’re not hearing an antitrust case about Microsoft’s Windows 95

Novell’s decade-long antitrust case against Microsoft has finally come to a close — and Microsoft’s stock is up.

The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear Novell’s appeal, upholding an appeals court’s Sept. 2013 decision and handing a decisive victory to Microsoft.

Novell had sought more than $3 billion from Microsoft for its anticompetitive tactics during the development of its Windows 95 operating system. Novell said Microsoft withheld software components called namespace extensions from competing developers, including Novell, so Microsoft’s own software ran better.

Novell said it was developing a word processing program called WordPerfect that would compete with Microsoft Word and that it was duped into developing the software for Microsoft’s operating system, only to have to pull the plug later so Microsoft could grab a greater share of the market for Word. Novell sold WordPerfect for a $1.2 billion loss, according to the company.

But Novell didn’t file its case until 2004, which the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled was too late. The appeals court also said the company didn’t make a broad enough case that Microsoft was trying to maintain an operating system monopoly.

The Supreme Court rejected Novell’s appeal without comment.