Back in 2004 Sun’s then CEO, Scott McNealy, stated in an interview with Jem Matzan (NewsForge reprint) about CDDL’ing OpenSolaris:

We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code — I couldn’t say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code

However, now that Judge Kimball has ruled that Novell actually owns the copyrights and not SCO I presume it’s now up to Novell to decide whether or not that deal is still valid, probably at least partly dependant on whether or not SCO can find the cash to pony up the dues on it they illegally withheld from Novell.

Could be interesting given Novell’s stake in Linux.