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Attached to IBM's subpoena (and available here) is a copy of the confidential report, which gives Houlihan's "opinion as to the fair value of the intangible assets, goodwill, and other aspects of the company… as of October 31, 2001."

The report assesses the valuation of intangible assets resulting from Caldera's acquisition of SCO and Acrylis (a Linux systems management software company Caldera acquired in May that year).

The first point of interest here, in the context of the SCO Group's later legal claims, is what assets it had assessed. They were:

· SCO's existing technology
· SCO's trade name and trademarks
· SCO's distribution channel
· SCO's distribution agreement
· Acrylis's existing technology

No mention of the Unix copyrights that have become the center of SCO's legal battles with IBM and Novell in the past three years… and no mention of the Unix contracts and licenses either. That does not, of course, prove that SCO did not or does not own the Unix copyrights, but the fact that it evidently did not consider them assets worthy of valuation indicates a vast change in the company's strategy between late 2001 and late 2002.

The other point of interest is the valuation that was put on the assets that Houlihan did assess, and the revenue projected from the company's various products. Houlihan valued the SCO technology at $1.9m, the Acrylis technology at $1m, the SCO trademarks at $289,000, and SCO's channel at $13m.

While the SCO Unix business made up the bulk of Caldera's revenue at that time, Houlihan's assessment also indicates that Caldera was well aware that was not going to last for long.

From a projected $54.2m in 2002, Caldera's revenue from SCO product was predicted to fall steadily to $11.6m in 2006. Meanwhile the Acrylis technology revenue was predicted to grow from $0.4m in 2002 to $13.1m in 2006, and "other Caldera" - i.e. Linux - revenue was predicted to go from $32.5m in 2002 to $118.7m in 2006.

If you were going to place all your chips on one of those three businesses, which one would you choose? While the Unix distribution channel provided the company with a great route to market and the Unix products a good reputation and user base to build on, clearly it was the Linux business that was likely to provide the company with its long-term revenue.

That Linux business was (eventually) shelved once the renamed SCO had raised concerns that Linux contained Unix copyright code, of course, while the Acrylis technology was spun off via Volution Technology, a joint venture with Center 7. (From there by the way, the Acrylis Technology appears to have vanished, although Volution may well have been folded back in to Center 7.)