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The article shows that the antics of tiny SCO have allowed the big guns to realign themselves in order to further their own battle strategies. Microsoft, which licensed the Unix operating system from SCO in May, must have jumped at the chance of using the small change of its cash reserves to take a swipe at IBM.

The other licensee that SCO had kept under its hat now turns out to be Sun which, as the Fortune article reveals, had already paid a cool $82m for what is described as a 'thorough' licence to SCO Unix IP. And earlier this year, agreed to pay for an additional 'clean up' licence, when the company understood that SCO really was going to take on IBM, as well as options to buy 210,000 shares of SCO stock at $1.83 a pop. With record revenues and SCO's first quarter in the black, SCO's stock has rocketed, with the result that Sun's little pile is now worth just shy of $2m.

Together, Sun and Microsoft will pay around $13m for SCO's Unix IP this year, according to the company's SEC filings.

The Fortune article also noted that HP had let SCO look at the Linux source it uses and found no instances of violation of SCO's IP.