Editing Canopy Group (section)

===Yarro case===
Even when he was with Novell, Noorda had begun experiencing some memory lapses, a condition that was confirmed publicly at the time.<ref name="NYT_Noorda_1993"/>  By 2004, the 80-year-old Noorda was suffering from [[Alzheimer's disease]], and a bitter fight broke out between Noorda family members and Canopy Group executives.<ref name="WSJ_FR_2005"/>  

On 17 December 2004, Noorda and other shareholders ousted chief executive Yarro, chief financial officer Darcy Mott, and corporate counsel Brent Christensen, accusing them of having taken amounts of at least $25 million from Canopy Group through "a series of self-dealing and wasteful transactions".<ref name="DN_FR_2005"/>  Yarro and the other executives sued in the [[Utah District Courts]] for $100 million for wrongful termination, claiming that Noorda had been unduly influenced, and Canopy countersued the three men.<ref name="DN_FR_2005"/><ref name="Mims_2005"/>  Each of the opposing parties in the lawsuits accused the other of taking advantage of Noorda's diminished state.<ref name="R_settlement_2005"/>

On 8 March 2005, the day before initial hearings were scheduled to begin, both parties negotiated a settlement out of court, ending the litigation.<ref name="DN_FR_2005_2"/>  Yarro, Mott, and Christensen remained terminated, but an undisclosed amount of money was paid by the Canopy Group to them.<ref name="DN_FR_2005_2"/>  Canopy agreed to relinquish ownership of all its 5.49 million shares in The SCO Group, transferring them to Yarro along with an undisclosed sum of money.<ref name="DN_FR_2005_2"/>  Yarro thus became The SCO Group's largest shareholder, owning about a third of it, and kept his title as chairman of its board.<ref name="DN_FR_2005_2"/>  While SCO remained a tenant in a Canopy Group building, there was no further connection between the two firms.<ref name="DN_FR_2005_2"/>  Yarro, Mott, and Christensen resigned from any other Canopy companies they had been involved with.<ref name="ZDN_settlement_2005"/>

Outside of Utah, much of the news of the conflict and settlement was filtered through its possible effect on the SCO Group and SCO's battle against Linux.<ref name="ZDN_settlement_2005"/><ref name="R_settlement_2005"/>  

But locally, there was an acute additional sense of loss around the conflict.<ref name="Mims_2005"/>   There was the scene of people squabbling amidst a computer industry pioneer's prolonged decline.<ref name="SLT_FR_2005"/><ref name="Mims_2005"/>  And, as the ''[[Salt Lake Tribune]]'' wrote, "Suicides have ended up becoming the tragic bookends for the bitter struggle to control Utah's Canopy Group."<ref name="SLT_FR_2005"/>  The first was when Robert L. Penrose, Canopy's director of information systems and technology, died of suicide in December 2004, days after becoming distraught at the ouster of Yarro and the others, and the second was when Ray Noorda's daughter Val Noorda Kreidel, one of the major participants in the lawsuits, died of suicide in March 2005, less than a week after the settlement was reached.<ref name="SLT_FR_2005"/>  Looking at the whole situation, the CEO of [[Altiris]], once a Canopy company, said, "Is this a tragedy or not? Ray Noorda and Canopy ... were key to our success. In 1998, they took the risk and invested in a little company out in Lindon, Utah, when [others] would not."<ref name="Mims_2005"/>