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Public ( NASDAQ : SCOX )
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Santa Cruz, California (SCO, 1979 )<br> Lindon, Utah (Caldera, 1994 )
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Lindon, Utah , USA
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Ralph Yarro III , Chairman<br> Darl McBride , CEO<br> Bert Young , CFO<br> Ryan E Tibbitts , General Counsel<br> Ransom Love , Founder (Caldera)<br> Doug Michels , Founder (SCO)<br> Larry Michels , Founder (SCO)
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166 ( 2005 )
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Operating System Software
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UnixWare , OpenServer
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$360 million USD ( 2005 )
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($107 million) USD ( 2005 )
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, Inc. ('''TSG''', informally '''SCO''') is a software company formerly called '''Caldera Systems''' and '''Caldera International'''. After acquiring
Santa Cruz Operation 's Server Software and Services divisions, as well as
UnixWare and
OpenServer technologies, the company changed its focus to
UNIX . Later on Caldera changed its name to ''The SCO Group'' to reflect that change in focus.
It was part of the
Canopy Group , but became independent after the settlement of a
Lawsuit between the
Noorda Family and a chairman of the group,
Ralph Yarro , also CEO of the Canopy Group, in very weird conditions.
{Link without Title}
See
Caldera OpenLinux for a more detailed history of Caldera Systems/Caldera International.
Caldera Systems, based in
Utah , was founded in
1994 by
Ransom Love , and received start-up funding from
Ray Noorda . Its main product was
Caldera OpenLinux , a
Linux Distribution mainly targeted at business customers and containing some proprietary additions.
In
2000 , Caldera acquired several UNIX properties from the Santa Cruz Operation, including OpenServer and UnixWare, proprietary operating systems for
PCs that would be expected to compete directly with Linux.
In
2002 , Caldera joined with
SuSE Linux,
Turbolinux and
Conectiva to form
United Linux in an attempt to standardize Linux distributions. Later that year,
CEO Ransom Love left the company and was replaced by
Darl McBride .
Caldera changed its name to ''The SCO Group'' that year.
In
2003 , the company asserted some of its products had been accidentally released into Linux by
IBM in a
Breach Of Contract . From this, the CEO (
Darl McBride ) authored several press releases claiming there were violations of SCO's intellectual property right in several of SCO's competitors' products; leading to legal action by
Red Hat .
A new division called
SCOsource was created to licence the company's intellectual property, selling technically an insurance against possible legal action against final customers, without proving that there is any IP infringement.
In a controversial move, the SCO Group sued two former customers (
Autozone and
Daimler-Chrysler ). SCO claims Autozone violated SCO's copyrights by using Linux. SCO did not go this far with Daimler-Chrysler. Instead, SCO claimed that Daimler-Chrysler breached a section of a UNIX licensing contract that required Daimler-Chrysler to respond to requests for certification by SCO. Daimler-Chrysler, when allegedly faced with such a request, did not respond. However, SCO also speculated that DaimlerChrysler broke the licensing agreement when they moved to the Linux operating system and that this is the reason why they refused to certify. These two cases, among others, cemented in an anti-SCO sentiment among Linux users. SCO tried to make this lawsuits appear an action for being linux users
{Link without Title} when they were in fact related to contracts between the companies.
SCO quickly became a bad word among rank-and-file Linux users. After announcing its legal claims against various Linux users and vendors, (see below), the company suspended sales and development of its Linux related products. Attention was shifted to the Unixware and OpenServer UNIX products previously acquired from the Santa Cruz Operation.
- , a modern UNIX operating system. UnixWare 2.x and below were direct descendants of Unix System V Release 4.2 and was originally developed by AT&T, Univel , Novell and later on Santa Cruz Operation. UnixWare 7 was sold as a "best of breed" UNIX OS combining UnixWare 2 and OpenServer 5 and was based on System V Release 5. UnixWare 7.1.2 was branded OpenUNIX 8, but later releases returned to the UnixWare 7.1.x name and version numbering.
- , another UNIX operating system, which was originally developed by Santa Cruz Operation. SCO OpenServer 5 was a descendant of SCO UNIX and based on System V Release 3.2. SCO had previously announced that they would deemphasize OpenServer and migrate existing users to their UnixWare platform, but later on they decided to reverse that decision.
- , an operating system and GUI created specifically for Point Of Sale applications.
- , a Web Services -based framework for modernizing legacy applications.
- , a development environment for rich-UI browser-based Internet applications.
- , an E-mail and collaboration solution.
- In late 2004 , SCO decided to unite their two operating systems (UnixWare and OpenServer) so that, while having differing operating environments, would share a common kernel, SVR5 . This was done so that applications and certifications for one system would work on the other.
- Also in late 2004, SCO announced the launch of the SCO Marketplace Initiative (http://www.sco.com/developers/marketplace/faq.html), in which it offers pay-per-project development opportunities.
- In early 2006 , SCO publicly released , a mobile services platform. (http://www.sco.com/products/meinc/ )
The SCO Group is currently involved in a dispute with various Linux vendors and users. In this campaign SCO asserts that Linux violates some of SCO's intellectual property. Although many are skeptical about their claims, SCO initiated a series of lawsuits and claims that, if upheld by the courts, may impact the future of both Linux and Unix. While making numerous public assertions that Linux infringes upon their
Copyright s, the lawsuits themselves concern contractual issues which are tangential to the issue of whether or not Linux infringes any copyrights. Further complicating the issue is the legitimacy of SCO claims concerning the ownership of SVR4 Unix copyrights. The success or failure of the claims will also have a profound effect on the financial future of The SCO Group, itself. SCO has, to date, made little headway in this dispute. In particular, in February
2005 , Judge Kimball, the Judge in the SCO v. IBM case has stated:
: Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities.
There was also a related lawsuit in which the group was involved known as the
Yarro Case
On
June 28 ,
2002 Darl McBride became the CEO of SCO, soon thereafter the company pursued litigation against IBM and Linux. McBride accused Linux of copying "line-by-line" SCO's proprietary source code in apparent contradiction to the subsequent Davidson email.
{Link without Title}
On
February 17 ,
2005 the SCO Group issued a press release that stated their stock may soon be delisted from
NASDAQ for failing to issue an annual 10-K report in a timely manner as required by
U.S. Securities And Exchange Commission regulations.
{Link without Title} In late April of 2005, after complying with the filing requirements, the NASDAQ switched trading of the SCO Group from "SCOXE" back to their original "SCOX" stock symbol.
On
July 1 ,
2005 , federal judge Dale A. Kimball denied The SCO Group's motion to amend their claim against IBM yet another time (a 3rd amended complaint) and include new claims regarding Monterey on the PowerPC architecture. In the same decision, the 5-week jury trial date was set for February
2007 {Link without Title}
- nothing---. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever," Davidson concluded.
