became embroiled in a bitter dispute when the Noorda family sought to oust board member Ralph Yarro III on claims of misappropriation. With internal problems not made public (which included the suicides of Canopy's director of information systems, Robert Penrose, and Val Kriedel, the daughter of Ray Noorda), the Canopy Group agreed to buy back all the shares that SCO had in Canopy in exchange for their SCO shares and cash. SCO and Canopy Group are now mostly independent, though SCO continues to rent their Utah office space from Canopy. Microsoft funding of SCO controversy On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal e-mail detailed how Microsoft had raised up to $106 million via the BayStar referral and other means. Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real, but claimed it to be "a misunderstanding". BayStar claimed the deal was suggested by Microsoft, but that no money for it came directly from them. In addition to the Baystar involvement, Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to "Unix and Unix-related patents", despite the lack of Unix-related patents owned by SCO. License deals between both companies may have reached at least $16M (USD) according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. This deal was widely seen in the press as a boost to SCO's finances which would help SCO with its lawsuit against IBM. SCOsource After their initial claim of copyright infringement in the Linux kernel, The SCO Group started their SCOsource initiative, which sells licenses of SCO's claimed copyrighted software, other than OpenServer and Unixware licenses. After a small number of high-profile sales (including one that was denied by the claimed purchaser), SCO claimed to offer corporate users of Linux a license at US$699 per processor running Linux. However, many individuals have found it impossible to buy such a license from SCO. SCO says that participants of the SCOsource initiative are not liable for any claims that SCO makes against Linux users. The Michael Davidson E-Mail On July 14, 2005, an email was unsealed that had been sent from Michael Davidson to Reg Broughton (both Caldera International employees) in 2002, before many of the lawsuits. In it, Davidson reported how the company had hired an outside consultant because (spelling as in the original): The consultant was to review the Linux code and compare it to Unix source code, to find possible copyright infringement. Davidson