Huh, I don't remember that, especially if those were the two different SCOs. The first, the Santa Cruz Operation, was OK ignoring some quality issues, and they are the organization that Microsoft got 25% of through that transaction in 1987. Much later, in 2001, this happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation#Asset_sal...And Caldera, which renamed itself in the next year to The SCO Group, got all of the original SCO's assets but Tarantella. Not sure what happened with Microsoft's ownership of the original SCO, but I don't remember through the years of SCO v. The World that Microsoft had a large ownership stake ... which would have been major.
Instead, per http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween10.html and my memory of Groklaw ..., well, here's ESR's first summation paragraph:
There you have it. At least a third of SCO's entire market capitalization, and their entire current cash reserves, is payoffs funnelled from Microsoft. Their 10Qs reveal that every other line of cash inflow is statistical noise by comparison. The brave new SCOsource business model is now clear: sue your customers, shill for Microsoft, kite your stock, and pray you stay out of jail.
I also seem to remember some Microsoft related deal involving the purchase of Novell SUSE? licenses, although now I can't remember if The SCO Group directly benefited from it.
Microsoft earned this part of its bad reputation, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's purchases from the company in part ended with Windows XP prior to that (of course, it helped that Vista was long delayed and awful). Supporting Microsoft back then was unconscionable.