SCO vs. Novell; Novell wins.

[Jerry Feldman]

On 03/31/2010 03:38 PM, Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote:
>> Maybe Cahn with Yarrow's help can resuect them into Caldera again
>> bringing with it a new United Linux as well as an inferior, but nicely
>> shrink-wrapped Linux :-), but SCO has been full of surprises.
>>     
> You must mean that "Caldera" has been full of surprises.  "SCO" has been
> gone a long time....may it Rest In Peace.
>
> "Caldera" never wanted to do "Linux".  What they wanted was a "cheap
> Linux" that was free of royalties and source code restrictions.  Only a
> few of them ever really understood "Free Software" in my opinion.  That
> is why Caldera kept putting proprietary, closed source packages on top
> of it.  It was why they kept pushing for POSIX and SUS compliance while
> lots of other distributions did not care.  Caldera wanted to be able to
> rename "Linux" as "Unix"....Linus just wanted a kick-ass system that ran
> lots of applications.
>
> So as SCO faded, Caldera went in and bought them, so they could take
> over the trademark, copyrights and royalties....and a fading channel.
>
> But the trademark belonged to X/Open (now the Open Group), the royalties
> were never SCO's and now the copyrights have been proven to belong to
> Novell.  Talk about poor "due diligence" in a purchase....
>
> IMHO after what SCO/Caldera has done to Linux, it would take a bearded
> guy in long robes who can walk on water to resurrect them again through
> a Linux offering.
>
> On the other hand, back in the early days of Linux, it was Doug
> Michaels, original President of SCO, that insisted on giving Linus a
> "Lifetime Achievement Award" at the tender age of 27.  I took a picture
> of that presentation, and even made a T-shirt out of it.  Later Doug
> wrote me a letter saying that "SCO had given things to Linux and taken
> things from Linux".  I passed on both the picture and the letter to the
> IBM lawyers.
>
> I liked Doug Michaels, and I liked his engineers both of whom I had the
> pleasure of working with several times.  Spent several nice late
> afternoons out on the parking lot overlooking Monterey bay with the SCO
> engineers watching the sun set over the waters and drinking a beer
> (o.k., several beers).
>
> I dislike what the "New SCO" has done to the Linux community, but I
> dislike even more that they sullied the name of Doug's company in doing
> it.  They should have stayed with the name "Caldera".
>   
My first Unix was Microsoft Xenix which was subsequently sold to The
Santa Cruz Operation. I worked with SCO Xenix and SCO system V back at
the BCS before we had a viable Linux. I really don't think that the new
SCO management and attorneys did due diligence. I think they may have
had some issue with IBM resulting from Project Monterey, but there is a
lot of information in press releases and web sites from Caldera that
undermine their quest. I think one of the real culprits in this whole
thing, other than Yarrow, is Kevin McBride. If I remember correctly he
was the one who convinced his brother, Darl, to start the litigaton, but
even before that, when Caldera bought the Unix division from Santa Cruz.
I think that Ransom Love had much different plans for the Santa Cruz
assets they bought when he was CEO of Caldera.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846


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