Back in the beginning of SCO's all-out assault on Linux and IBM, the Unix company received a much-needed financial boost to its lawsuit plans with two major contracts. These deals with Microsoft and Sun brought SCO $26.5 million. This money, in turn, fueled SCO's lawsuits.
At the time, many critics of SCO wondered what in the world Sun and Microsoft could have been buying from SCO. Most people thought the answer was that they were buying an attack on a rival company, IBM, and a rival operating system, Linux.
Now, as a byproduct of SCO v. Novell—the case over who really owns Unix's IP (intellectual property)—and thanks to Groklaw, we now know what Sun was buying from SCO (PDF download). In part, it does seem to be an attack on Linux. But that wasn't all.
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