Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote: > Not really. The SCO that bought Xenix is not the SCO that is suing IBM. > The SCO that is suing is actually Caldera. They changed the name to > capitalize on SCO's name recognition as they were making money from > "SCO UNIX" which they had bought a source license* (but not the patents > and copyrights) from Novell. > > ... > > * This was fairly common around 1990. AT&T sold many source licenses > for UNIX. SCO bought one, Everex (ESIX) bought one, Interactive Systems > (later owned by Kodak and sold to SUN) bought one, etc.
The fact that in the mid 80's dozens of vendors, including SCO, bought a source license from AT&T, doesn't mean that SCO didn't buy the copyright later. I write from my memory, but my memory is quite good: AT&T transferred the ownership of the source, plus the patents, plus the copyrights, plus the name "UNIX", to a daughter company called "USL" (UNIX System Labs). Later, USL and Novell (then headed by Ray Noorda, a UNIX lover and Microsoft's hater) founded a joint venture, called "Univel". After about 2 years, USL sold everything (ownership of the source, patents, copyrights, "UNIX") to Univel. Later, Novell (still headed by Noorda) bought USL shares in Univel, and became the only owner of Univel. Then, it merged Univel into Novell. At about the same time (before or after, I don't remember), there was a promise that came from the leading vendors, to unite around UNIX, if it became standard. So Novell transferred the name "UNIX" to X/Open. Later, X/Open and OSF merged, and renamed to "The Open Group", which is the current owner of name UNIX. Thanks to that, everybody that passes the verification tests of The Open Group, is permitted to call his OS "UNIX". Meanwhile, Novell revenues dropped, and Ray Noorda, the strong man, was fired by the shareholders. Novell lost interest in UNIX, and sold everything (source, patents, copyrights) to SCO. Note: The most important patent - the SetUID-on-exec - expired before this transaction. When this patent was active, you couldn't develop UNIX, even from scratch, without violating this patent. But as far as I know, AT&T had never enforced this patent. Ray Noorda still had dreams about beating Bill Gates, so he founded a company called "Caldera", and planned to lead the Linux world and win the OS battle against MS. He had some mines in his way, and not everything went in the way he planned, so when the shares of Caldera were still very high (the DotCom hype) and SCO shares were down, he exploited the opportunity, and acquired SCO (for shares, if I recall correctly); For a very small amount of shares, he gained control (again...) on the sources of UNIX, patents, copyrights, etc. (I think that Ray Noorda left Caldera too). As somebody else noted, Caldera re-branded itself as "SCO". Dozen of vendors, still pay SCO annual fees of millions, for continuous licensing of the sources. Since SCO cut most of the R&D of the kernel, I believe it was the most profitable revenue of SCO in the last years. IBM probably had a one-time fixed price, for an unlimited time; I guess that they had a lot of money, so preferred to pay a one-time huge price, but for a forever license (I didn't follow the SCO-IBM controversy, so this is only a guess). SCO probably claims that IBM violated the agreement, so SCO claims that it can cancel the license of IBM. Now, there is only one thing that should be checked: whether IBM violated the terms or not (i.e. did it "steal" code to AIX and/or Linux). I believe that the answer is not clear, so there is going to be a long trial. If this will be the case, both of the sides will prefer M&A (Merger and/or Acquisition). Just to clarify: Microsoft didn't BUY the sources of UNIX, but only a license, like MANY other companies. The price was higher than most of the other licensees, just because Microsoft uses it in more installations (there are pieces of UNIX code in MANY products of MS, like Interix, HOST products, and even NT kernel). By the way: an unknown fact, is that more than 50% of the worldwide UNIX installations belong to SCO, and all the other (including Sun and HP) have (together!) less than SCO alone. In numbers, and ignoring costs, it is possible to say that SCO shipped more licenses than all the others together, and was leading the UNIX market. But it's only a (meaningless) statistical fact. -- Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] CTO, Founder Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. __________________________________________________________ Tel.: +972-9-766-1020 8 Yad-Harutzim St. Fax.: +972-9-766-1314 P.O.B. 7004 Mobile: +972-50-23-7338 Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
