The end is near for SCO (hopefully)

[Jerry Feldman]

On 05/06/2009 01:29 PM, John Abreau wrote:
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Jerry Natowitz <j.natowitz-KealBaEQdz4 at public.gmane.org> wr=
ote:
>  =20
>> Putting aside the unrepentantly sleazy nature of SCO's management, doe=
s
>> anyone feel at least a tiny bit sad about the passing of SCO?
>>
>> I have a college buddy who made a good living in the early 90s selling=

>> SCO-based POS systems that supported up to 150 serial terminals on a
>> single x86 box.  Yes, GNU/Linux and Solaris would be able to do the
>> same, but not for a number of years.
>>
>>    =20
>
>
> This is a different SCO.  The old SCO went away, and some of their IP
> was acquired by Caldera Linux.  The present SCO is just a renamed
> Caldera Linux, and has no connection other than the name to the old SCO=
=2E
>
>
>
>  =20
The old Santa Cruz Operation sold their Unix division to Caldera=20
International  in August 2000.  The remains of the old Santa Cruz=20
Operation changes its name to Tarantella, and is now part of Sun.=20
Caldera International changes name to the SCO Group in August 2002=20
shortly after former Caldera CEO Ransom Love is replaced by Darth Vader=20
(eg. Darl McBride). This is when all the shit started to hit the fan.

Basically, the Old SCO sold Xenix (a Microsoft developed version of=20
Unix), and System V (a more modern version updated by AT&T). At the=20
time, there were a few versions of Unix that ran on PC hardware, but SCO =

was successful in the corporate market place and had a worldwide sales=20
and service organization. It is interesting that along the way both=20
Santa Cruz and new SCO violated the APA where the Unix assets were sold=20
to old SCO. In subsequent litigation, Novell was able to argue=20
successfully that it never transferred copyrights and patents to old=20
SCO. And, if you look at some of the testimony you'll find that the=20
Novell Board of Directors was concerned that oldSCO was not financially=20
stable enough and in the case of a oldSCO bankruptcy, they wanted to be=20
able to keep the title to those assets.

Another interesting fact is that Glenn Noorda, the founder of Novell was =

also the founder of Caldera.. There was also some litigation around the=20
Canopy Group that held some of Noorda's assets as well as a majority of=20
newSCO.

Basically, there were some decent POS systems going back to the 1970s. I =

was one of the programmers for the Burger King Manex, a proprietary POS=20
jointly developed by Burger King and AMF based on a DEC PDP-8. The=20
problem with using Unix as a POS is that the Unix licensing at the time=20
was based on the number of users (eg. terminals). The PC Unix was=20
generally a 2-user license.  Unix vendors, such as SCO, Digital, Sun,=20
HP, IBM and others had the responsibility to enforce these limits. When=20
I worked for Nixdorf, we were supposed to be developing a Unix based=20
system, but our system essentially had a single application running on=20
multiple terminals, and the traditional Unix licensing virtually killed i=
t.

--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846