walter fry wrote: > >I never thought I'd be cheering on the Nazgul of Armonk as they laid > >waste to Caldera's and the Santa Cruz Operation's successors. > > Having gone to high school in Santa Cruz county I am naturally interested > in hearing the background of SCO. I am very naive about that, would you be > so kind as to go into some detail, if you don't want to burden this wire > about that then I would like to invite you to wire me directly, particulaly > because I have heard Eugene affectionatly reffered to as Santa Cruz North ( > among other things such as Berzerkly North )
Short answer: The SCO Group is a different company than The Santa Cruz Operation. Less short answer: It's a long, complicated story. The whole thing has been chronicled in great detail at http://www.groklaw.net/ . Here's a quick summary. The company currently known as The SCO Group has only a passing resemblence to the Santa Cruz Operation -- they're sometime referred to as newSCO and oldSCO. The Santa Cruz Operation was founded around 20 years ago, was headquartered in Santa Cruz (obviously) and sold Unix (not Linux) for PCs. Somewhere along the line, they bought Novell's Unix business. Novell had previously bought it from AT&T. Caldera Linux Systems was an unrelated company, headquartered in Lindon, Utah, founded in the late 1990s. Its business was to sell its own Linux distribution. Similar to SuSE or Redhat, but Caldera was not successful. The Canopy Group is an investment company that became the majority owner of both oldSCO and Caldera. (I think they'd always owned Caldera, but I'm not sure.) They decided to restructure their companies, and they transferred oldSCO's Unix business to Caldera. This was sometime in 2000-2002, I think. In March, 2003, Caldera sued IBM. They made various claims, among them that IBM has infringed Caldera's copyrights by putting Unix code into Linux, that IBM has violated its Unix license with AT&T --er, Novell --er, oldSCO --er, Caldera. One of the people who launched the lawsuit has practically admitted in a magazine interview that it was intended as a nuisance suit. But IBM didn't pay Caldera off, it chose to fight the suit. They countersued Caldera for GPL violations and for infringing IBM's patents. In the summer of 2003, Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group. (Meanwhile, oldSCO had changed its name to Tarantella.) It did that for the purpose of blurring the distinction between newSCO and oldSCO. It worked, some of the judge's early rulings have indicated confusion on which company is which. Meanwhile, IBM invested more than $200 million in Novell. Novell, it turns out, is (99% probability -- that's in court too) the actual owner of the Unix copyrights. NewSCO's current management apparently didn't understand that oldSCO hadn't bought the copyrights from Novell. Novell also exercised a clause in their contract with oldSCO that excused IBM from any contract violations. So now newSCO has no suit, and they are still facing IBM's countersuit, which seems to be much more solid than newSCO's suit. NewSCO's strategy, since they found that IBM wasn't going to roll over, has been to delay the suite as much as possible. It now appears that they will run out of money before the suit is resolved. Their stock was delisted from the NASDAQ last month. That saddens me. It would be wonderful if this suit had resulted in IBM using its formidable legal resources to prove the GPL valid. But that probably won't happen now. This is the extremely short form of an astoundingly byzantine, convoluted story. I haven't mentioned newSCO's accounting problems, the BayStar/RBC stock ripoff, Microsoft's investment in SCO, Canopy's corporate shell games, the Yarro lawsuit, SCO vs. Novell, newSCO's flurry of frivolous suits against its end user customers, oldSCO's public domain release of "ancient Unix", or how the USL vs. California Regents (aka the BSD trial) affects these suits. -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
