eWeek: Novell Douses ‘Smoking Gun’ Against SCO

“Some members of the open-source community thought they had
found a ‘smoking gun’ against the SCO Group and its claims to
ownership of the intellectual property rights to the Unix operating
system, but Novell Inc. on Thursday poured cold water on that.

“Buried in SCO’s 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange
Commission for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2002, under the
section titled ‘Restricted Cash and Royalty Payable to Novell,
Inc.,’ SCO says that it has an arrangement with Novell in which it
acts as an administrative agent in the collection of royalties for
customers who deploy SVRx technology.

“Under that agency agreement, SCO collects all customer payments
and remits 95 percent of the collected funds to Novell and retains
5 percent as an administrative fee. SCO records the 5 percent
administrative fee as revenue in its consolidated statements of
operations…”

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Related Story:
LWN.net:
A Couple of SCO Amusements(May 30, 2003)