(b) Buyer shall not, and shall not have the authority to, amend, modify or waive any right under or assign any SVRX License without the prior written consent of Seller. In addition, at Seller's sole discretion and direction, Buyer shall amend, supplement, modify or waive any rights under, or shall assign any rights to, any SVRX License to the extent so directed in any manner or respect by Seller. In the event that Buyer shall fail to take any such action concerning the SVRX Licenses as required herein, Seller shall be authorized, and hereby is granted, the rights to take any action on Buyer's own behalf. Buyer shall not, and shall have no right to, enter into future licenses or amendments of the SVRX Licenses, except as may be incidentally involved through its rights to sell and license the Assets or the Merged Product (as such term is defined in the proposed Operating Agreement, attached hereto as Exhibit 5.1(c)) or future versions thereof of the Merged Product.
(from section 4.16 of the Asset Purchase Agreement). Novell was doing a license audit in 2Q 2003. It does look like Novel retained significant control over what SCO can and can't do with the core UNIX SysV licence. Also Novel has put up a bunch of corrospondance between them and SCO http://www.novell.com/licensing/indemnity/legal.html I havn't read them all by any means, but a variety of things seem to be discussed. Darl's unsupported comments in the media and possible liability due to them. Possible contract violations by SCO. Why SCO hasn't been making royalty payments to Novel for SysV licences (they may own Novel a big chunk of all that money that MS paid them a while back - that wasn't mentioned on the SEC forms I read at the time - Last I checked, the SEC frowned on those kinds of omissions.)
