SCO: the Linux company

Jun. 26, 2006

If there's anyone left who doesn't get that SCO -- eternal enemy of LinuxTM -- started out doing its best to combine Unix and Linux and was still giving Linux away under the GPL after it started its Linux law-suits, they should read some of Groklaw's recent stories.

In one tale, Groklaw editor Pamela Jones reprints a Caldera 2001 press release that comes right out and says the merged SCO and Caldera had been, "Over the last seven months" ... working "to jointly develop and deploy integrated products and solutions that allow us to unify UNIX with Linux to provide this alternative platform."

None of that comes as any surprise to me. I followed the merger of SCO and Caldera like a hawk, and Caldera had always intended since day one to merge the best features of Linux and Unix together.

There was nothing that could be misunderstood about this. In an interview with Ransom Love, Caldera's CEO, in February 2001, he told me that "Caldera will make UnixWare binary-compatible with Linux, allowing UnixWare customers to run Linux applications. On the flip side, Caldera Linux will gain UnixWare's best enterprise and database management features. These include large file system support, asynchronous input/output (I/O), the UnixWare API, extended developer kit, and multipath I/0."

There you go, folks. It's in black and white.

Love and other executives went on to say that partners should expect a new product-branding strategy. Specifically, Caldera's platforms would be branded by functionality (database server, Web server, etc.) instead of by operating system. The partner push would involve cross-selling and cross-development between the UnixWare and Linux communities.

After Love was forced out of Caldera -- by then renamed SCO -- he again told me in an interview in 2003 that: "When we acquired SCO and Unix, our intention was to see how Unix could expand and extend Linux. In a lot of technologies, Linux was going in slightly different ways, but we thought Unix was the natural companion to it.

"We took the Linux code that was available and learned to cleanly match it with the Unix APIs. The idea was to adopt Linux APIs and mechanisms to function on top of a scalable Unix code designed for SMP [symmetric multiprocessing]. At the time, Linux was moving to clustering to make Linux more scalable. We wanted to combine Unix's improved symmetric multiprocessing with Linux so that it would have both excellent clustering and SMP," he continued.

"Indeed, at first we wanted to open-source all of Unix's code, but we quickly found that even though we owned it, it was, and still is, full of other companies' copyrights," Love added.

In a series of recent stories, Jones pointed out that you could still download GPLed Linux from SCO in June 2003 and February 2004 -- almost a year after SCO sued IBM.

I bring all this up again, because I've recently run into some people who think that because SCO has been continuing to push for so long on this case there must be some fire behind its Linux smoke.

There's not.

Why, then, is SCO continuing to bang its head against the wall? Well, there's always that one-in-a-million shot that compulsive gamblers shoot for. And, last but never least, there are companies like Microsoft that wish Linux ill and have supported SCO financially.

Coincidence? I don't think so.


-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols