|
| |
|
| |
Public ( NASDAQ : SCOX )
|
| |
Santa Cruz, California (SCO, 1979 )<br> Lindon, Utah (Caldera, 1994 )
|
| |
Lindon, Utah , USA
|
| |
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)
|
| |
166 ( 2005 )
|
| |
Operating System Software
|
| |
UnixWare , OpenServer
|
| |
$292 million USD ( 2006 )
|
| |
($166 million) USD ( 2006 )
|
, Inc. ('''TSG''', informally '''SCO'''; ) is a software company formerly called '''Caldera Systems''' and '''Caldera International'''. After acquiring the
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 former CEO of the Canopy Group.
See Also: Caldera OpenLinux
Caldera Systems, based in . Its main product was
Caldera Network Desktop , a
Linux Distribution mainly targeted at business customers and containing some proprietary additions. Caldera later purchased The Linux Support Team Software GmbH and its LST Linux distribution. LST was made the basis of their following product
Caldera OpenLinux .
Caldera inherited a lawsuit against
Microsoft when it purchased
DR-DOS from
Novell in 1996. This lawsuit related to Caldera's claims of
Monopolization ,
Illegal Tying ,
Exclusive Dealing , and
Tortious Interference by Microsoft. Microsoft reached an undisclosed settlement in 2000 with Caldera (which, according to Microsoft, included a substantial payment to Caldera).
Later 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 , and the company changed its name to ''The SCO Group''.
Shortly after changing its name, SCO began to claim that Linux "contained SCO's UNIX System V source code and that Linux was an unauthorized derivative of UNIX"
1. SCO filed suit against
IBM for an unprecedented
US$ 1 billion and demanded that Linux end-users pay license fees.
Microsoft is said to have bolstered SCO's financial situation in 2003 by purchasing a license to Unix technology and by helping to arrange funding
2. A new division called
SCOsource was created to licence the company's
Intellectual Property (IP). These claims provoked outrage among Linux users, who denied that Linux had copied SCO's intellectual property. Linux distributor
Red Hat filed suit against SCO in
Delaware .
Novell , from whom SCO claimed to have acquired its Unix IP, announced that it had not sold the copyrights to SCO and that it retained them. In response, SCO sued Novell for
Slander Of Title in
Utah , home state of both SCO and Novell.
Subsequently, the SCO Group sued two former customers (
Autozone and
Daimler-Chrysler ). SCO claimed that Autozone violated SCO copyrights by using Linux. SCO claimed that Daimler-Chrysler breached its UNIX license contract by inappropriately using derivative works of UNIX and by refusing to respond to requests for certification of compliance by SCO (see
SCO_v._DaimlerChrysler ). SCO's suit against Daimler-Chrysler was dismissed in 2004.
After announcing its legal claims against various Linux users and vendors (see
SCO-Linux Controversies ), 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 The 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 The Santa Cruz Operation. SCO OpenServer 5 was a descendant of SCO UNIX, which is in turn a descendent of XENIX . OpenServer 6 is, in fact, an OpenServer compatibility environment running on a modern SVR5 based UNIX kernel.
- , 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, based on a mixture of open-source and closed-source software.
- , a web browser for DOS . Code from Arachne was bought and used.
- In late 2004, SCO announced the launch of the SCO Marketplace Initiative {Link without Title} , in which it offers pay-per-project development opportunities.
- In early 2006 , SCO publicly released , a mobile services platform. {Link without Title}
See Also: SCO-Linux controversies
The SCO Group is currently involved in a dispute with various Linux vendors and users. In this campaign SCO "announced that Linux contained SCO's UNIX System V source code and that Linux was an unauthorized derivative of UNIX". 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 doc #398
{Link without Title}
On
August 10 2007 , Judge Kimball, hearing the SCO v. Novell case, ruled that "...the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights". Novell was awarded summary judgments on a number of claims, and a number of SCO claims were denied. SCO was instructed to account for and pass to Novell an appropriate portion of income relating to SCOSource licences to Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. A number of matters are not disposed of by Judge Kimball's ruling, and the outcome of these are still pending.
MEMORANDUM DECISION AND ORDER Civil Case No. 2:04CV139DAK
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 containing "line-by-line" copies of SCO's proprietary source code.
On
February 17 the SCO Group issued a press release that stated their stock may soon be
Delisted from the
NASDAQ Stock Exchange 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" (which denotes a listing which may be delisted soon) back to their original "SCOX" stock symbol.
On
July 1 , 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 five-week jury trial date was set for February
2007 .
3
- nothing---. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever," Davidson concluded. At which time SCO presented as evidence an e-mail from a Robert Swartz, a consultant hired by SCO to compare UNIX and Linux source files, that copyright infringement could exist.
