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131-524: SCO UNIX was the successor to the Santa Cruz Operation 's variant of Microsoft Xenix , derived from UNIX System V Release 3.2 with an infusion of Xenix device drivers and utilities. SCO UNIX System V/386 Release 3.2.0 was released in 1989, as the commercial successor to SCO Xenix. The base operating system did not include TCP/IP networking or X Window System graphics; these were available as optional extra-cost add-on packages. Shortly after

262-456: A Microsoft executive on SCO's board of directors; that executive, Microsoft's chief financial officer Frank Gaudette, would play an important role in guiding SCO to become a mature enterprise. The deal contained provisions to prevent Microsoft from exercising dominant control over the smaller SCO. By some accounts, the Microsoft board member often had to be asked to leave discussions when

393-520: A SuSE code origin), and the promise of common certification across all four products, attracted some support from hardware and software vendors such as IBM, HP, Computer Associates, and SAP. An assessment of SCO Linux 4 in eWeek found that it was a capable product, although the Webmin configuration tool was seen as limited when compared to YaST , SuSE's own operating system configuration tool. In terms of service and support, SCO pledged to field

524-513: A Unix port to the LSI-11 variant of the PDP-11. Xenix is a Seventh Edition Unix-based version of the operating system that Microsoft worked on, initially for the PDP-11. SCO first began working with Xenix in 1981. In 1982, Microsoft and SCO forged a joint agreement for development and technology exchange, with the two companies' engineers working together on improvements to Xenix. (Microsoft

655-599: A chance at "living the American dream". The company's financial hole was emphasized when it released its results for the fiscal year ending October 31, 2002 – it had lost $ 25 million on revenues of $ 64 million. The previously announced operating system releases began appearing, beginning with a Linux release. Caldera International had been one of the founders of the United Linux initiative, along with SuSE , Conectiva , and Turbolinux , and

786-654: A commercial interest in Unix technology itself, it did want to clear the way for Linux, having recently purchased SuSE Linux , the second largest commercial Linux distribution at the time. On January 20, 2004, the SCO Group filed a slander of title suit against Novell, alleging that Novell had exhibited bad faith in denying SCO's intellectual property rights to Unix and UnixWare and that Novell had made false statements in an effort to persuade companies and organizations not to do business with SCO. The SCO v. Novell court case

917-527: A decade earlier. On May 28, 2003, Novell counterattacked, saying its sale of the Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation back in 1995 did not include the Unix software copyrights, and thus that the SCO Group's legal position was empty. Jack Messman, the CEO of Novell, accused SCO of attempting an extortion plan against Linux users and distributors. Unix has a complex corporate history, with

1048-557: A dozen or so dumb terminals and a couple of printers plugged into a system running [a] small database system. It's simple, small and stable." By early 1987, SCO had relocated its offices to a building at 400 Encinal Street in an industrial park in the Harvey West area of Santa Cruz (the building had been previously occupied by Intel). As of a year later, SCO employed some 500 people, mostly in Santa Cruz, and had plans to build

1179-518: A draft press release concerning SCO's plans had been in the works for several weeks and had been quietly circulated to other companies in the industry. The O'Gara report, unconfirmed as it was, caused some amount of consternation in the Linux community. On January 22, 2003, creation of the SCOsource division of the company, to manage the licensing of the company's Unix-related intellectual property,

1310-516: A familiarity with the Unix operating system and its potential for use in the business world. By early 1981, SCO was selling a report analyzing Unix features and availability based on a poll it had taken of over sixty members of the /usr/group association. Moreover, people at SCO realized that since Unix was portable and not controlled by any hardware manufacturer, use of it could allow microprocessor-based system manufacturers to avoid having to develop

1441-475: A graphical user interface based on the X Window System and Open Software Foundation Motif toolkit ; TCP/IP networking; support for the NFS network file system and OS/2 LAN Manager ; database support; and Merge 386 for running DOS-based applications. Regarding OSF Motif, this is its first appearance in a commercial product, and Open Desktop became the first graphical Unix for an Intel 32-bit processor that

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1572-569: A historical comparison for his strategy of building back up the brand and being more responsive to customers, McBride used a model of the revival of the Harley-Davidson brand in the 1980s. Besides McBride, other company executives, including new senior vice president of technology Opinder Bawa, were heavily involved in the change of direction. The product name Caldera OpenLinux became "SCO Linux powered by UnitedLinux" and all other Caldera branded names were changed as well. In particular,

1703-496: A large technical publications operation at this time, with substantial staffing in each of the Santa Cruz, Toronto, and Watford offices, who as a group published on the order of 30,000 pages of documentation on a 18-month release cycle. One of the tech writers at Watford from 1991 to 1995 was science-fiction author Charles Stross , and his experiences in that office would provide some of the setting for his 2000s work The Atrocity Archives . Collectively, Xenix and SCO UNIX became

1834-422: A later technology base. However Xenix comprised the largest installed base of any of the early commercial variants of Unix; it remained a good seller among some customers and SCO releases of Xenix continued until Xenix/386 version 2.3.4 was put out in 1991. Microsoft's level of commitment to Xenix was always viewed with some suspicion within the industry. It later became clear that by the mid-1980s, Microsoft

1965-705: A long series of legal battles . The rights to OpenServer, as well as UnixWare, were acquired by UnXis in 2011, which was later renamed Xinuos . In June 2015, Xinuos announced OpenServer 10, which is based on the FreeBSD 10 operating system. Simultaneously, Xinuos introduced a migration path for existing customers using older OS products. In December 2015, Xinuos released "definitive" versions of OpenServer 5, OpenServer 6, and UnixWare 7. In December 2017, Xinuos released "Definitive 2018" versions of OpenServer 6 and UnixWare 7, and in October 2018 OpenServer 5 Definitive 2018

2096-605: A major new release of OpenServer that incorporated the UnixWare kernel inside it. SCO also made a major push in the burgeoning smartphones space, launching the Me Inc. platform for mobility services. But despite these actions, the company steadily lost money and shrank in size. In 2007, SCO suffered a major adverse ruling in the SCO v. Novell case that rejected SCO's claim of ownership of Unix-related copyrights and undermined much of

2227-440: A million and a billion [dollars], right? I just wanted to know what real, tangible intellectual property value the company held." Shortly before the name change to SCO, Caldera went through its existing license agreements, found some that were not being collected upon, and came to arrangements with those licensees representing some $ 600,000 in annual revenue. In particular, from the start of his time as CEO, McBride had considered

2358-417: A new office building there. By early 1991, that new building, 425 Encinal Street, was holding an open house event for prospective employees. The company subsequently established offices in several other buildings in the Harvey West area. These included 324 Encinal Street, 150 Dubois Street, and 100 Pioneer Street. By the late 1980s, fed by strong computer science program that emphasized Unix design and

2489-416: A new program called SCO Update, more frequent updates of capabilities were promised beyond that. Caldera's Volution Messaging Server product was retained and renamed SCOoffice Server, but the other Caldera Volution products were split off under the names Volution Technologies, Center 7, and finally Vintela. In addition to reviving SCO's longtime operating system products, the SCO Group also announced

2620-622: A new venture, SCOBiz. SCOBiz was a collaboration with the Bellingham, Washington -based firm Vista.com, founded in 1999 by John Wall, in which SCO partners could sell Vista.com's online, web-based e-commerce development and hosting service targeted at small and medium-sized businesses. More importantly, as part of SCOBiz, the two companies would develop a SOAP - and XML -based web services interface to enable Vista.com e-commerce front-ends to communicate with existing back-end SCO-based applications. Industry analysts were somewhat skeptical of

2751-543: A number of the features of Release 4. Initially supplemented by some engineers who transferred from SCO's headquarters operation in Santa Cruz, the ex-Logica group in Watford became one of the major development sites for SCO and over the next few years did the operating system kernel development work behind the subsequent SCO OpenDesktop and SCO OpenServer product releases. It later did engineering work in networking, security, escalations, and other areas, in addition to being

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2882-576: A particular application domain built or assembled customized software for that domain and then sold that as a turnkey solution to the business. SCO Unix was also used by chains such as Radio Shack and Taco Bell . SCO capitalized on the increasingly prevalent "open systems" movement of the time, which held that a combination of interoperability , portability , and open software standards should result in computer users should not being locked into any one computer company's product. Moreover, Doug Michels became an effective and convincing advocate for

3013-538: A product. SCO UNIX , full name SCO UNIX System V/386 Release 3.2.0, had first customer ship in June 1989; this became the basis for commercial successor to SCO Xenix. Based on an agreement forged with AT&T the previous year, it was also the first SCO operating system to carry the 'Unix' word itself in the product name. In early 1990, the integrated product SCO Open Desktop began shipping. It features on top of SCO UNIX System V/386 several critical functionalities:

3144-430: A profile of SCO based around the notion that it might become "the next Microsoft". While SCO operating systems were often the basis of vertical market software offerings by others, SCO had long desired to create additional horizontal market software applications for its operating system product as part of further popularizing it. Thus SCO had provided some basic applications with Xenix, including database, graphics,

3275-423: A proprietary operating system of their own, which they had neither the time nor the expertise to do. Accordingly, the company decided to focus on custom jobs of porting the Unix system and applications that ran on it. Eric S. Raymond , in his book The Art of Unix Programming (which places the start of SCO in 1978), calls SCO the "first Unix company", although Interactive Systems Corporation , which put out

3406-572: A renaming of Caldera International , accompanied by McBride becoming CEO and a major change in business strategy and direction. The SCO brand was re-emphasized, and new releases of UnixWare and OpenServer came out. The company also attempted some initiatives in the e-commerce space with the SCOBiz and SCOx programs. In 2003, the SCO Group claimed that the increasingly popular free Linux operating system contained substantial amounts of Unix code that IBM had improperly put there. The SCOsource division

3537-650: A robust internship program at SCO, some 50 to 60 percent of SCO employees were UC Santa Cruz graduates. SCO now employed some 800 people overall, mostly in its Santa Cruz offices but also in the UK office and in one in Washington, D.C. By early 1989, SCO had sold some 350,000 copies of Xenix in total, mostly through its channel. The company was achieving what the Santa Cruz Sentinel termed "explosive growth". SCO would subsequently reorient its product on

3668-682: A set of escalation engineers that would only be handling SCO Linux issues. The new Unix operating system releases then came out. UnixWare 7.1.3 was released in December 2002, which featured improved Java support, the Apache Web Server framework, and improvements to the previously developed Linux Kernel Personality (LKP) for running Linux applications. In particular, the SCO Group stated that due to superior multiprocessor performance and reliability, Linux applications could run better on UnixWare via LKP than they could on native Linux itself,

3799-592: A stance that dated back to Santa Cruz Operation/Caldera International days. One review, that found UnixWare 7.1.3 lacking in a number of other respects, called LKP "the most impressive of UnixWare's capabilities". SCO OpenServer 5.0.7 was released in February 2003; the release emphasized enhanced hardware support, including new graphic, network and HBA device drivers, support for USB 2.0 , improved and updated UDI support, and support for several new Intel and Intel-compatible processors. The SCOx software framework

3930-409: A strategy that was commonly adopted in intellectual property litigation. However, during the company's Forum conference, SCO did publicly show several alleged examples of illegal copying of copyright code in Linux. Until that time, these examples had only been available to people who signed a non-disclosure agreement , which had prohibited them from revealing the information shown to them. SCO claimed

4061-465: A technically difficult port of Xenix to the unmapped Intel 8086 processor (earlier 8086 Xenix ports required an off-chip MMU ) and licensed rights from Microsoft to be able to ship its packaged Unix system, Xenix, for the IBM PC XT . This work takes advantage of earlier porting and compilers work that Altos Computer Systems had done for the mapped 16-bit Intel architecture. The resulting system

OpenServer - Misplaced Pages Continue

4192-481: A technology-focused venture capital firm, made a $ 50 million private placement investment in SCO, to be used towards the company's legal costs and general product development efforts. In December 2003, SCO sent letters to 1,000 Linux customers that in essence accused them of making illegal use of SCO's intellectual property. Novell continued to insist that it owned the copyrights to Unix. While Novell no longer had

4323-515: A tremendous source of revenue for SCO. The potential for this happening was certainly beneficial to SCO's stock price, which during one three-week span in May 2003 tripled in value. Another counterattack came in August 2003, when Red Hat, Inc. v. SCO Group, Inc. was filed by the largest of the Linux distribution companies. The SCO Group received a major boost in October 2003 when BayStar Capital ,

4454-609: A vice president for ten years. (Larry Michels was first cousin of another technology entrepreneur, Allen Michels . ) Towards the end of that time, Michels became head of the Advanced Products Laboratory for TRW Electronics , and relocated to Santa Cruz to run it remotely from there. As part of this, Michels was involved with a telephony business, TRW Vidar . This was a company, based in Mountain View, California , that TRW had acquired and that

4585-465: A violation." The legal considerations involved were complex, and resolved around subtleties such as how the notion of derivative works should be applied. Furthermore, Novell's argument that it had never transferred copyrights to the Santa Cruz Operation placed a cloud over the SCO Group's legal campaign. Most, but not all, industry observers felt that SCO was unlikely to win. InfoWorld drily noted that Las Vegas bookmakers were not giving odds on

4716-457: A word processor, and a spreadsheet. In 1988, these applications were bundled together as part of an offering known as SCO Office Portfolio, which serves as an integrated environment for office automation on Xenix, SCO Unix, and SCO Open Desktop. The portfolio primarily comprises SCO Lyrix, a word processor; SCO Professional, a spreadsheet; and SCO Integra, an SQL-based relational database. The first two were developed by SCO, while SCO Integra

4847-522: Is back from the dead", and a story in The Register began "SCO lives again". As part of this, the company adopted SCOX as its trading symbol. The change back to a SCO-based name reflected recognition of the reality that almost all of the company's revenue was coming from Unix, not Linux, products. For instance, McDonald's had recently expanded its usage of OpenServer from 4,000 to 10,000 stores; indeed, both OpenServer and UnixWare were strong in

4978-522: Is based on an SQL engine from Coromandel Industries augmented by a 4GL called Accell from Unify Corporation . Linking them together was the SCO Manager, which has a character-based but multi-windowed interface. It provides desktop tools such as mail, calendaring, and chat; an expandable menu system; and a clipboard mechanism for transmitting information between applications. The system administration interface for SCO Unix itself also adopted

5109-475: Is binary compatible with, and can run applications built for, Altos Xenix systems, and was a successful venture for SCO. Somewhat in parallel with that, SCO and Microsoft also developed the 68000 -based Xenix port for the Apple Lisa . It has multiuser capability as well as support for virtual terminals for single users. SCO also sold applications for Xenix on Lisa, including a Uniplex word processor,

5240-623: The MGM Grand Las Vegas , the SCO Group made an expansive defense of its legal actions. Framed by licensed-from-MGM James Bond music and film clips , McBride portrayed SCO as a valiant warrior for the continuance of proprietary software , saying they were in "a huge raging battle around the globe", that the GNU General Public License that Linux was based on was "about destroying value", and saying that like Bond, they would be thrown into many battles but come out

5371-639: The Multiplan spreadsheet from Microsoft, Level II COBOL from Micro Focus , and the Informix database software from Relational Database Systems . While the Lisa was not a success in the personal computer marketplace, its powerful-for-its-price-point processor combined with a relatively inexpensive operating system gave third-party vendors an attractive platform for building systems to compete with minicomputers, and SCO sold several thousand copies of Xenix for

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5502-546: The New Jersey development office it gained in the deal led a series of enhancements to the UnixWare product aimed at the high-end enterprise and data center spaces. Beginning in the late 1990s, SCO faced increasingly severe competitive pressure, on one side from Microsoft's Windows NT and its successors and on the other side from the free and open source Linux . In 2001, the Santa Cruz Operation sold its rights to Unix and its Unix divisions to Caldera Systems . After that

5633-554: The SCO Group . The SCO Group continued the development and maintenance of OpenServer. On June 22, 2005, OpenServer 6.0 was released, codenamed "Legend", the first release in the new 6.0.x branch. SCO OpenServer 6 is based on the UNIX System V Release 5 kernel, a merged codebase of UNIX System V Release 4.2MP and UnixWare 7 . OpenServer 6.0 features multi-threading application support for C, C++, and Java applications through

5764-571: The System V Interface Definition (SVID), one of the early Unix standardization efforts. In October 1985, SCO announced the availability of Xenix System V for the Intel 8088 -based IBM PC XT and the Intel 80286 -based IBM PC AT and IBM PC XT . The product can support ten remote users via serial ports and was sold with optional packages for software development in C or assembly language and for text processing. There had been concern within SCO about

5895-455: The System V Release 4 and UnixWare business from Novell (which had two years earlier acquired the AT&;T -offshoot Unix System Laboratories ) to improve its technology base. But beginning in the late 1990s, SCO faced increasingly severe competitive pressure, on one side from Microsoft's Windows NT and its successors and on the other side from the free and open source Linux . In 2001,

6026-535: The System V/386 Release 3.2 version, which adds the ability to run existing Xenix binary applications on System V without requiring recompilation. This capability makes use of the new Intel Binary Compatibility Standard (iBCS), developed by Intel, AT&T, and SCO. The AT&T release of System V/386 Release 3.2 was announced at SCO Forum in 1988, but further work was needed by SCO to incorporate Xenix device drivers before SCO could release it as

6157-662: The Lisa. This was the first shrink-wrapped binary product sold by SCO, and its sales convinced SCO of the potential of that kind of product. A third target of SCO's Xenix porting work was the DEC Professional 350 . As Larry Michels said in early 1984, "SCO will continue offering custom XENIX adaptions to the large OEM market – the Original Equipment Manufacturers – who make up SCO's established customer base." SCO also sold Unix training. By September 1983, SCO had around 60 employees and

6288-580: The Michelses soon became intrigued by the microprocessor revolution then underway, in which computer systems based on processors such as the Intel 8080 or the Zilog Z80 could be put together much quicker than the minicomputers of the past. In the consulting work they did, SCO was dealing with various resellers and small time-sharing companies in helping those companies formulate their technology strategies. The people at SCO had, and further acquired,

6419-601: The Microsoft C compiler that dates back to Xenix days but can produce binaries for either Xenix or Unix. In addition, the SCO Open Desktop Development System also offers the AT&;T pcc compiler , here called rcc, but it can only compile for Unix. SCO Canada continued to sell HCR's Cfront -based C++ product, which by 1991 had an estimated 450 licensed sites using it. The Toronto site also took on some porting and integration work. SCO had

6550-553: The POSIX interface. OpenServer 6 features kernel-level threading (not found in 5.0.x). Some improvements over OpenServer 5 include improved SMP support (support for up to 32 processors), support for files over a terabyte on a partition (larger network files supported through NFSv3), better file system performance, and support for up to 64GB of memory. OpenServer 6.0 maintains backward-compatibility for applications developed for Xenix 286 onwards. The SCO Group went bankrupt in 2011, after

6681-723: The Portfolio Manager interface. Early 1990 also saw the release of Microsoft Word version 5.0 for Xenix and SCO Unix, which was also available as part of SCO Office Portfolio. It has functionality equivalent to Word for DOS, and was marketed to government agencies and other organizations running multiuser office systems. This was followed in early 1991 by Word 5.1 for SCO Unix, which has graphical user interface support. As part of adapting Word to Unix, SCO made various enhancements for multiuser support and workgroup-related features. SCO Group The SCO Group (often referred to SCO and later called The TSG Group )

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6812-501: The SCO Group a number of steps removed from the Bell Labs origins of the operating system. Novell and the SCO Group quickly fell into a vocal dispute that revolved around the interpretation of the 1995 asset-transfer agreement between them. That agreement had been uncertain enough at the time that an amendment to it had to be signed in October 1996, and even that was insufficiently unambiguous to now preclude an extended battle between

6943-505: The SCO MPX multiprocessor extension to SCO UNIX had been delivered in 1990 based on development work that SCO did in conjunction with the firm Corollary, Inc. This effort produced the first version of Unix to support the symmetric multiprocessing capability of Compaq's. The primary market segment for SCO Unix was small businesses, such as real estate offices or florists to take two examples, where specialized dealers who were familiar with

7074-452: The Santa Cruz Operation for its part in the failed Project Monterey of the late 1990s. Overall, SCO maintained that Linux could not have caught up to "Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality" so quickly without coordination by a large company, and that this coordination could have happened through the taking of "methods or concepts" even if not a single line of Unix code appeared within Linux. The SCO v. IBM case

7205-633: The Santa Cruz Operation sold its rights to Unix and its SCO OpenServer and UnixWare products to Caldera International . Caldera, based in Orem, Utah , was founded in 1994 by several former Novell employees who saw promise in Linux as a technology and failed to convince Novell management to move forward with it. Caldera's early funding came from Ray Noorda , the former CEO of Novell, and the Utah Valley -based Canopy Group investment fund that Noorda started for high-technology firms. The company had been in

7336-626: The U.S. trademark "SCO" was transferred. SCO was founded in 1979 in Santa Cruz, California , by Larry Michels and his son Doug Michels as a computer consulting company that focused on both technology and management considerations. Larry Michels, 48 years old at the time, was an electrical engineer who had gone into the aerospace industry in Los Angeles. He had then founded a credit verification company, Credifier Corporation, which he sold to TRW Inc. , for whom he subsequently served as

7467-563: The United Kingdom. In 1987, the company brought out the SCO Xenix 386 Toolkit, which allowed developers to start coding applications and device drivers for the new Intel 80386 processor in addition to the existing 80286. Later that year, SCO's full release of Xenix for 80386 was made; the chip was powerful enough that Xenix running on it could handle some 30 different users. SCO provided some basic applications with Xenix. But

7598-524: The WebFace Solution Suite, a web-based application development environment with a set of browser-based user interface elements that provided a richer UI functionality without the need for Java applets or other plug-ins. Indeed, in putting together WebFace, Vultus was a pioneer in AJAX techniques before that term was even coined. The acquisition of Vultus resulted in a shift of emphasis in

7729-414: The amount that Microsoft actually owned included 16 percent, 14 percent, and 11 percent. Microsoft did not fully exit its position in SCO until 2000. In any case, intellectual property rights were not transferred in the 1989 agreement and SCO would continue to pay Microsoft royalties for Xenix and Unix technologies. Not until 1997 was SCO able to reach an agreement with Microsoft that relieved SCO of

7860-461: The basis for products like PizzaNet (the first Internet-based food delivery system done in partnership with Pizza Hut ) and SCO Global Access, an Internet gateway server based on Open Desktop Lite. Due to its large installed base, SCO OpenServer 5 continues to be actively maintained by SCO with major updates having occurred as recently as September 2018. SCO OpenServer 6, based on the merging of AT&T UNIX System V Release 4.2MP and UnixWare 7 ,

7991-411: The battle, but the three analysts it polled gave odds of 6-to-4 against SCO, 200-to-1 against SCO, and 6-to-4 for SCO. In any case, while Linux customers may not have been happy about the concerns and threats that the SCO Group was raising, it was unclear whether that was slowing their adoption of Linux; some business media reports indicated that it was, or that it might, while others indicated that it

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8122-451: The business chances of the 80286 product, since IBM had elected to come to market with their own Unix. But that IBM effort, contracted to Interactive Systems Corporation and called PC/IX , resulted in a product that was unsuccessful. There had been considerable skepticism in the industry that Unix could ever establish a successful market position on the PC. These included beliefs that Unix

8253-443: The business of selling its Caldera OpenLinux product but had never been profitable. It attempted to make a combined business out of Linux and Unix but failed to make headway and had suffered continuing financial difficulties. By June 2002, after it had moved to nearby Lindon , its stock was facing a second delisting notice from NASDAQ and the company had less than four months' cash for operations. As Wired magazine later wrote,

8384-411: The chances for SCOBiz succeeding, as the market was already crowded with application service provider offerings and the dot-com bubble had already burst by that point. Lastly, SCO announced a new program for partners, called SCOx. A key feature of SCOx was a buyout option that allowed SCOx solution providers to sell their businesses back to SCO. McBride stated that the program would give partners

8515-458: The code had already been removed from the Linux kernel, because it duplicated already existing functions. By early 2004, the small amount of evidence that had been presented publicly was viewed as inconclusive by lawyers and software professionals who were not partisan to either side. As Businessweek wrote, "While there are similarities between some code that SCO claims it owns and material in Linux, it's not clear to software experts that there's

8646-495: The company "faced a nearly hopeless situation". On June 27, 2002, Caldera International had a change in management, with Darl McBride , formerly an executive with Novell , FranklinCovey , and several start-ups, taking over as CEO from Caldera co-founder Ransom Love. Change under McBride happened quickly. On August 26, 2002, he announced at the company's annual Forum conference  – relocated from Santa Cruz to Las Vegas – that Caldera International

8777-519: The company in business. A key turning point was when Compaq Computer began shipping systems with Unix installed and chose SCO to be their provider. Larry Michels tended to focus on the business aspects of the company while Doug Michels focused on technology facets; together they became recognized as pioneers of the Unix-on-PC industry. Larry Michels was president of SCO and Doug Michels was, as Larry put it, "the number-two person", usually with

8908-585: The company's second fiscal quarter, which led to the SCO Group turning a profit for the first time in its Caldera-origined history. In July 2003, the SCO Group announced it had acquired Vultus Inc. for an unspecified price. Vultus was a start-up company, also based in Lindon, Utah, and the Lindon-based Canopy Group was a major investor in Vultus just as it was the SCO Group. Vultus made

9039-542: The company's web services initiative, with an announcement being made in August 2003 at SCO Forum that SCOx would now be a web services-based Application Substrate, featuring a combination of tools and APIs from Vultus's WebFace suite and from Ericom Software 's Host Publisher development framework. A year later, in September 2004, this idea materialized when the SCOx Web Services Substrate (WSS)

9170-503: The corporation retained only its Tarantella product line, and changed its name to Tarantella, Inc. Caldera Systems became Caldera International and then changed its name to The SCO Group , which has created some confusion between the two companies. The company described here is the original Santa Cruz Operation. Although generally referred to simply as "SCO" up to 2001, it is now sometimes referred to as "old SCO", "Santa Cruz", or "SCO Classic" to distinguish it from "The SCO Group" to whom

9301-602: The courts, but McBride professed to be nonplussed: "If it takes a couple of years, we're geared to do that." For his part, Boies said he liked David versus Goliath struggles, and his firm would see a substantial gain out of any victory. In mid-May 2003, SCO sent a letter to some 1,500 companies, cautioning them that using Linux could put them in legal jeopardy. As part of this, SCO proclaimed that Linux contained substantial amounts of Unix System V source code and that, as such, "We believe that Linux is, in material part, an unauthorized derivative of Unix." As CNET wrote,

9432-417: The features of Release 4. The 1992 releases of SCO UNIX 3.2v4.0 and Open Desktop 2.0 added support for long file names and symbolic links . The next major version, OpenServer Release 5.0.0, released in 1995, added support for ELF executables and dynamically linked shared objects , and made many kernel structures dynamic. SCO OpenServer 5, released in 1995, would become SCO's primary product and serve as

9563-521: The field. However, Open Desktop did not make inroads on the personal computer market, as SCO Unix's system resource requirements were strenuous and there were few commonly used PC applications available for it. Beginning in the late 1980s, AT&T and Sun Microsystems worked on a merge of Xenix, BSD , SunOS , and System V Release 3 features, with the result being known as UNIX System V Release 4 . SCO UNIX and Open Desktop remained based on System V Release 3, but eventually added home-grown versions of

9694-637: The first commercial Unix release (as a base for office automation systems) in 1977, perhaps has a stronger case. The first Unix-based operating system that SCO made is for the PDP-11 , is named DYNIX (not to be confused with a same-named Unix variant later made by Sequent Computer Systems ), and is based on Seventh Edition Unix . It supports the Tymshare service and by early 1981 was included in Tymshare's DYNASTY computer system offering. SCO also did

9825-547: The head of Caldera International, he became interested in what intellectual property the company possessed. He had been a manager at Novell in 1993 when Novell had bought Unix System Laboratories, and all of its Unix assets, including copyrights, trademarks, and licensing contracts, for $ 335 million. Novell had subsequently sold its Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation, which had then sold it to Caldera. So in 2002, McBride said he had thought: "In theory, there should be some value to that property – somewhere between

9956-582: The industry for leading the U.S. federal government's successful prosecution of Microsoft in United States v. Microsoft Corp. ; as McBride subsequently said: "We went for the biggest gun we could find." News of the SCO Group's intent to take action regarding Linux first broke on January 10, 2003, in a column by technology reporter Maureen O'Gara of Linuxgram that appeared in Client Server News and Linux Business Week . She wrote that

10087-401: The infringements were divided into four separate categories: literal copying, obfuscation , derivative works, and non-literal transfers. The example used by SCO to demonstrate literal copying became known as the atemalloc example. While the name of the original contributor was not revealed by SCO, quick analysis of the code in question pointed to SGI . At this time it was also revealed that

10218-453: The legal validity of the GPL license were to be called into question. Conversely, a clear SCO loss would clarify any intellectual property concerns related to Linux, make corporate IT managers feel more relaxed about adopting Linux as a solution, and potentially bolster corporate enthusiasm for the open source movement as a whole. There's nothing like a good legal battle to whip up passions, and

10349-411: The licensing of our intellectual property"; this effort was provisionally called SCO Tech. Senior vice president Chris Sontag was put in charge of it. By the end of 2002, McBride and SCO had sought out the services of David Boies of the law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner as part of an effort to litigate against what it saw was unrightful use of its intellectual property. Boies had gained fame in

10480-401: The longstanding UnixWare name – which Caldera had changed to Open UNIX – was restored, such that what had been called Open UNIX 8 was now named in proper sequence as UnixWare 7.1.2. Announcements were made that a new OpenServer release, 5.0.7, and a new UnixWare release, 7.1.3, would appear at the end of the year or beginning of the next. Moreover, through

10611-660: The mid-1990s, SCO acquired two further UK companies, IXI Limited in Cambridge and Visionware in Leeds , which led to a suite of client-to-Unix integration products and then the Tarantella product line. SCO's operating system technology moved from Xenix to System V Release 3 as reflected by the products SCO Open Desktop and SCO OpenServer . In 1995, SCO bought the System V Release 4 and UnixWare business from Novell and, in collaboration with several hardware partners,

10742-498: The most installed flavor of Unix due to the popularity of the x86 architecture. Hardware manufacturers that manufactured Intel-based systems and that resold a SCO operating system on it included not just Compaq but also DEC , Tandy Computers , Siemens Nixdorf , Olivetti , Unisys , and Hewlett-Packard . Especially significant were those systems with multiprocessor capability, such as the Compaq SystemPro , for which

10873-652: The move "dramatically broaden[ed]" the scope of the company's legal actions. At the same time, SCO announced it would stop selling its own SCO Linux product. A casualty of this stance was SCO's participation in the United Linux effort, and in turn United Linux itself. While the formal announcement that United Linux had ended did not come until January 2004, in reality the project stopped doing any tangible work soon after SCO filed its lawsuit against IBM. A few days later, Microsoft – which had long expressed disdain for Linux – said that it

11004-503: The name was retained in the years that would follow because it told people where they were coming from. Offices for the new firm were established at 500 Chestnut Street in the downtown area of Santa Cruz. But as Doug Michels conceded in a 2006 interview, in terms of what they would be doing, "We didn't really have an idea." Pure consulting work held little ongoing appeal, and the notion of helping large businesses manage rapid technological change proved difficult in practice. However,

11135-504: The new SCOsource division, telling investors on a February 26 earnings call that he expected it to bring in $ 10 million alone in the second fiscal quarter. On March 6, 2003, SCO filed suit against IBM, claiming that the computer giant had misappropriated trade secrets by transferring portions of its Unix-based AIX operating system into Linux, and asked for at least $ 1 billion in damages. The complaint also alleged breach of contract and tortious interference by IBM against

11266-683: The newly-named SCO Linux 4 came out in November 2002, in conjunction with each of the other vendors releasing their versions of the United Linux ;1.0 base. The SCO product was targeted towards the small-to-medium business market, whereas the SuSE product was aimed at the enterprise segment and Conectiva and Turbolinux were intended mostly for the South American and Asian markets. The common United Linux base (which mostly came from

11397-597: The obligation to include Microsoft code, and pay royalties on that code regardless of whether it was used or not, in SCO products. And that only came after SCO filed a complaint against Microsoft for violating European Union competition law , a complaint that was ruled valid by the European Commission . Needing to create a product from a more recent branch from the Unix family tree, Unix System V Release 3 , SCO, together with Microsoft and Interactive Systems Corporation , worked during 1987 and 1988 to develop

11528-409: The open systems idea. The premise in SCO's case was that an industry standard operating system for industry standard hardware – capable of handling the kind of multi-tasking, multi-user workload that MS-DOS could not – would give customers a compelling offering that previously was thought only possible with considerably more expensive minicomputers. By early 1991, The New York Times was publishing

11659-525: The possibility of claiming ownership of some of the code within Linux. Outgoing Caldera CEO Ransom Love had told him: "Don't do it. You don't want to take on the entire Linux community." During the August 2002 name change announcement, Bawa stated: "We own the source to UNIX; it's that simple. If we own the source, we are entitled to collect the agreed license fees." But at the time, McBride said he had no intention of taking on Linux. By October 2002, McBride had created an internal organization "to formalize

11790-695: The purchase has been variously explained as a desire to keep a Xenix technology partner, as a hedge against the growth of Unix, and as a hedge against the Open Software Foundation . Yet another explanation was the one given by Larry Michels in 1991, making reference to the SCO Unix product then being sold: "The paradox is if you were Microsoft, Open Desktop isn't something you want to see succeed. But if it doesn't, something else will, and they would rather see Open Desktop than whatever that would be. We pay them royalties." Later figures stating

11921-407: The real value came from the 1,700 other applications that had been developed by value-added resellers (VARs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) for the platform, including such domains as auto parts management, medical accounting, bakery process control, and many others. As one retrospective look characterized it, Xenix served "as a workhorse for small businesses – places where you might find

12052-533: The relaxed lifestyle there and because the university would provide a ready supply of technically suitable employees. By some sources The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. was incorporated in January 1979. The name came from Larry Michels' time as head of the TRW advanced research group, when the remote outpost had been known as 'the Santa Cruz operation'. The Michelses decided to use that for the name of their new firm, and

12183-409: The release of this bare OS, SCO shipped an integrated product under the name of SCO Open Desktop, or ODT. 1994 saw the release of SCO MPX, an add-on SMP package. At the same time, AT&T completed its merge of Xenix, BSD , SunOS , and UNIX System V Release 3 features into UNIX System V Release 4 . SCO UNIX remained based on System V Release 3, but eventually added home-grown versions of most of

12314-680: The replicated sites business. Furthermore the SCO brand was better known than the Caldera one, especially in Europe, and SCO's large, existing reseller and partner channel was resistant to switching to Caldera's product priorities. McBride emphasized that the OpenServer product was still selling: "What is it with the OpenServer phenomenon? We can't kill it. One customer last month bought $ 4 million in OpenServer licenses. The customers want to give us money for it. Why don't we just sell it?" As

12445-697: The replicated sites space, where a SCO-based system was deployed in each of a retail or restaurant chain's stores. Despite seeing rapid growth in terms of revenues, SCO tended to have high research and development costs and was never consistently profitable either before or after going public in 1993. SCO bought two former Xenix outfits, the Software Products Group within Logica in 1986 and HCR Corporation in 1990, thereby gaining development offices in Watford, England and Toronto, Canada . During

12576-458: The rest of its legal position. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection soon after and attempted to continue operations. Its mobility and Unix software assets were sold off in 2011, to McBride and UnXis respectively. Renamed to The TSG Group, the company converted to Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2012. A portion of the SCO v. IBM case continued on until 2021, when a settlement

12707-586: The right to distribute the UnixWare system and its System V Release 4 code base from Novell in 1995. SCO was eventually able to re-use some code from that version of UnixWare in later releases of OpenServer. Until Release 6, this came primarily in the compilation system and the UDI driver framework and the USB subsystem written to it. By the end of the 1990s, there were around 15,000 value-added resellers (VARs) around

12838-456: The sales, marketing, and customer engineering hub for SCO's EMEA region. SCO acquired the Toronto, Canada-based HCR Corporation in 1990. Since their interactions in the early Xenix days, HCR had become Canada's leading commercial Unix platform developer. The HCR acquisition allowed SCO to improve its development tools offerings, especially for Open Desktop. SCO Canada took over work on

12969-496: The small and medium business (SMB) market. It is widely used in small offices, point of sale (POS) systems, replicated sites, and backoffice database server deployments. Prominent larger SCO OpenServer customers include McDonald's , Taco Bell , Big O Tires , Pizza Hut , Costco pharmacy, NASDAQ , The Toronto Stock Exchange , Banco do Brasil , many banks in Russia and China , and the railway system of India . SCO purchased

13100-702: The title of executive vice-president, but both employees and outside investors were encouraged to treat the two as an indivisible team. In December 1986, SCO acquired the Software Products Group division of Logica. It became a wholly owned subsidiary, the Santa Cruz Operation Limited, and the basis for SCO's UK operation, with its office subsequently being relocated first to Soho and then to Watford outside London. By 1993, almost half of SCO's revenues came from outside North America, and of that, almost half came from

13231-550: The topic became how SCO could best compete with Microsoft. Already on the board since 1987 was another Microsoft veteran, Jim Harris, who had been a leader of Microsoft's OEM sales efforts. "We had a very long relationship with Microsoft. We were partners, we were competitors, they invested in us, at one point they owned [around 20 percent] of the company, we licensed technology from them, we had lawsuits with them, we had every type of relationship with Microsoft you can imagine." —Doug Michels, 2012. Microsoft's motivation for

13362-441: The two companies. In July 2003, SCO began offering UnixWare licenses for commercial Linux users, stating that "SCO will hold [as] harmless [any] commercial Linux customers that purchase a UnixWare license against any past copyright violations, and for any future use of Linux in a run-only, binary format." The server-based licenses were priced at $ 699 per machine, and if they were to become mandatory for Linux users, would represent

13493-407: The victor in the end. Linux advocates had repeatedly asked SCO to enumerate and show the specific areas of code in Linux that SCO thought were infringing on Unix. An analyst for IDC said that if SCO were more forthcoming on the details, "the whole discussion might take a different tone." However, SCO was reluctant to show any such code in public, preferring to keep it secret ‍ — ‍

13624-538: The world who provided solutions for customers of SCO's Unix systems. SCO announced on August 2, 2000, that it would sell its Server Software and Services Divisions, as well as UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, to Caldera Systems , Inc. The purchase was completed in May 2001. The remaining part of the SCO company, the Tarantella Division, changed its name to Tarantella, Inc. , while Caldera Systems became Caldera International , and subsequently in 2002,

13755-411: Was SCOBiz e-commerce integration, although other uses were possible as well. The planned SCOx architecture overall was composed of layers for e-business services, web services, SSL-based security, a mySCO reseller portal, hosting services, and a software development kit. But by then, these software releases and e-commerce initiatives had become overshadowed by legal actions. As soon as McBride became

13886-611: Was a part of TRW Electronics. TRW Vidar was a pioneer in digital telephone switches , and also an early user of Version 6 Unix in its development environment. Michels felt that TRW as a whole did not understand the rapid change that computers were bringing to businesses or what it had with Vidar – "They thought they were buying a telephony business, they thought that telephony was telephony, but they really were computers. Unless you approached them as being computers, you didn't end up with anything." He then left TRW to do management consulting work, thinking, as he later said, that "if TRW

14017-417: Was acquiring a Unix license from SCO, in order to ensure interoperability with its own products and to ward off any questions about rights. The action was a boon to SCO, which to this point had received little support in the industry for its licensing initiative. Another major computer company, Sun Microsystems , bought an additional level of Unix licensing from SCO to add to what it had originally obtained

14148-703: Was already expanding into a second office, at 1700 Mission Street in Santa Cruz. While some of SCO's staff had studied computer science, others were coming from backgrounds in linguistics, sociology, psychology, or business. In early 1984, Microsoft and SCO issued a joint announcement about SCO's rights to distribute Xenix within the United States. SCO Xenix for the PC XT shipped sometime in 1984 and contains some enhancements from 4.2BSD Unix, Micnet local area networking, and multiuser support. In 1985, SCO worked with AT&T and Microsoft to test conformance with

14279-457: Was an American software company in existence from 2002 to 2012 that became known for owning Unix operating system assets that had belonged to the Santa Cruz Operation (the original SCO), including the UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, and then, under CEO Darl McBride , pursuing a series of high-profile legal battles known as the SCO–Linux controversies . The SCO Group began in 2002 with

14410-569: Was announced in April 2003; its aim was to enable the SCO developer and reseller community to be able to connect web services and web-based presentation layers to the over 4,000 different applications that ran small and midsize businesses and branch offices. The web services aspect of SCOx included bundled SOAP/XML support for the Java, C, C++, PHP, and Perl languages. A primary target of the SCOx framework

14541-407: Was called SCO System V for Linux, which was a set of shared libraries intended to allow SCO Unix programs to be run legally on Linux without a user needing to license all of SCO OpenServer or UnixWare as had theretofore been necessary. The company continued to lose money, on revenues of $ 13.5 million in the first fiscal quarter of 2003, but McBride was enthusiastic about the prospects for

14672-414: Was changing its name to The SCO Group. He did this via a multimedia display in which an image of Caldera was shattered and replaced by The SCO Group's logo, which was a slightly more stylized version of the old Santa Cruz Operation logo. The attendees at the conference, most of whom were veteran SCO partners and resellers, responded to the announcement with enthusiastic applause. McBride announced, "SCO

14803-418: Was created to monetize the company's intellectual property by selling Unix license rights to use Linux. The SCO v. IBM lawsuit was filed, asking for billion-dollar damages and setting off one of the top technology battles in the history of the industry. By a year later, four additional lawsuits had been filed involving the company. Reaction to SCO's actions from the free and open-source software community

14934-470: Was founded in 1979 by Larry Michels and his son Doug Michels and began as a consulting and Unix porting company. An early involvement with Microsoft led to SCO making a product out of Xenix on Intel-based PCs. The fundamental insight that led to SCO's success was that there was a large market for a standard, "open systems" operating system on commodity microprocessor hardware that would give business applications computing power and throughput that previously

15065-731: Was having so much trouble, it was probably an interesting business [helping companies] go about making these transitions." As a result of this connection, some have considered The Santa Cruz Operation to have been an offshoot of TRW Vidar. Doug Michels, 25 years old at the time, had graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1976 with a degree from their department of computer and information science. He had then started his own consulting operation, focusing on technical work. The two saw some commonalities in their consulting endeavors and decided to join forces to reduce overhead. They chose to stay in Santa Cruz both because of

15196-452: Was inherently large and complex enough that it needed a minicomputer, the platform on which it had been developed, in order to run effectively. As Larry Michels said in early January 1991, "We had all the problems of being ahead of the market." The company had never been adequately funded, as venture capitalists were unenthused by the idea of Unix on a PC; cash flow problems resulted and the Michelses used much of their personal savings to keep

15327-580: Was initially released by The SCO Group in 2005. It includes support for large files, increased memory, and multi-threaded kernel (light-weight processes). This merged codebase is referred to as UNIX System V Release 5 (SVR5) and was used only by SCO for OpenServer 6; SVR5 is not used by any other major developer or reseller. SCO OpenServer 6 contains the UnixWare 7 's SVR5 kernel integrated with SCO OpenServer 5 application and binary compatibility, OpenServer 5 system administration, and OpenServer 5 user environments. SCO OpenServer has primarily been sold into

15458-457: Was intensely negative, and the general IT industry was not enamored of the actions either. SCO soon became, as Businessweek headlined, "The Most Hated Company in Tech". SCO Group stock rose rapidly during 2003, but then SCOsource revenue became erratic and the stock began a long fall. Despite the industry's attention to the lawsuits, SCO continued to maintain a product focus as well, putting out

15589-570: Was losing interest in Xenix from their own business perspective, both due to the cost of licensing it from AT&T and because MS-DOS was rapidly taking off as a product. In February 1989, it was announced that Microsoft was taking a minority investment in SCO by buying an amount less than 20 percent of that company. The terms of the agreement, which were not publicly disclosed, provided SCO with funds that it acutely needed in order to continue to expand in its rapidly growing market. The deal put

15720-416: Was met by criticism; as Computerworld later sarcastically wrote: "Faced with a skeptical customer base, SCO did what any good business would do to get new customers: sue them for money." In any case, the stage was set for the next several years' worth of court filings, depositions, hearings, interim rulings, and so on. The SCOsource division got off to a quick start, bringing in $ 8.8 million during

15851-527: Was no longer listed as a product on Xinuos' home page, implying that it had been withdrawn from marketing. Santa Cruz Operation The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (usually known as SCO , pronounced either as individual letters or as a word) was an American software company , based in Santa Cruz, California , that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants for Intel x86 processors: Xenix , SCO UNIX (later known as SCO OpenDesktop and SCO OpenServer ), and UnixWare . SCO

15982-480: Was not. The stakes were high in the battle the SCO Group had started, involving the future of Unix, Linux, and open source software in general. If SCO were to win its legal battles, the results could be extremely disruptive to the IT industry, especially if SCO's notion of derivative works were to be construed broadly by the courts. Furthermore a SCO victory would be devastating to the open source movement, especially if

16113-583: Was officially announced, as was the hiring of Boies to investigate and oversee legal protection of that property. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Linux users had generally assumed that Linux was created independently of Unix proprietary code, and Linux advocates were immediately concerned that SCO was going to ask large companies using Linux to pay SCO licensing fees to avoid a lawsuit. The first announced license program within SCOsource

16244-434: Was only possible with considerably more expensive minicomputers. SCO built a large community of value-added resellers that would eventually become 15,000 strong and many of its sales to small and medium-sized businesses went through those resellers. This community was exemplified by the annual SCO Forum conference, held in a scenic setting that reflected the company's Santa Cruz culture. SCO also had corporate customers in

16375-578: Was packaged in shrink-wrapped form. SCO used technology partners for much of this work. The graphical desktop itself is the X.desktop one from IXI Limited ; The TCP/IP networking stack and NFS implementation come from Lachman Associates , while Open Systems Interconnection software comes from Retix, Inc. The relational database manager included is Ingres . The Merge functionality comes from Locus Computing Corporation . Version 3.2.2 of SCO Unix and Open Desktop came out in mid-1990; it contains various fixes and improvements for problems found in

16506-546: Was reached for a tiny fraction of what SCO had initially sued for. The Santa Cruz Operation had been an American software company, founded in 1979 in Santa Cruz, California , that found success during the 1980s and 1990s selling Unix -based operating system products for Intel x86 -based server systems. SCO built a large community of value-added resellers that eventually became 15,000 strong and many of its sales of its SCO OpenServer product to small and medium-sized businesses went through those resellers. In 1995, SCO bought

16637-486: Was released for UnixWare 7.1.4. Its aim was to give existing SCO customers a way to "webify" their applications via Ericom's tool and then make the functionality of those applications available via web services. However, as McBride later conceded, the SCOx WSS failed to gain an audience, and it was largely gone from company mention a year later. In the keynote address at its SCO Forum conference in August 2003, held at

16768-488: Was released. The "Definitive 2018" releases were a commitment by Xinuos to keep the legacy OS's updated and supported protecting the applications that customers need to continue to run. The Definitive 2018 products contain major updates over the Definitive releases, and an updated development kit was released which makes it easier to compile current packages for the Definitive 2018 products. However, by 2023, OpenServer 10

16899-506: Was still a small company at the time, with perhaps 25 or 50 employees. ) Microsoft and SCO then further engaged Human Computing Resources in Canada, and the Software Products Group within Logica in the United Kingdom, as part of making further improvements to Xenix and porting Xenix to other platforms. In doing so, Microsoft gave HCR and Logica the rights to do Xenix ports and license Xenix binaries in those territories. In 1983, SCO made

17030-413: Was underway. Lawsuits against two Linux end users, SCO Group, Inc. v. DaimlerChrysler Corp. and SCO v. AutoZone were filed on March 3, 2004. The first alleged that Daimler Chrysler had violated the terms of the Unix software agreement it had with SCO, while the second claimed that AutoZone was running versions of Linux that contained unlicensed source code from SCO. As a strategy this move

17161-450: Was underway; it would come to be considered one of the top technology battles of all time. Many industry analysts were not impressed by the lawsuit, with one saying: "It's a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company [...] This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can't get by winning in the marketplace." Other analysts pointed to the deep legal resources IBM had for any protracted fight in

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