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127-641: With the rise of Linux during the 1990s, Linux distributions proliferated . Since the Linux kernel and GNU were both free software , anyone could put together and market a distribution. Many industry observers feared fragmentation and wide-ranging incompatibility, similar to the UNIX wars of the early 1990s. The first moves towards the United Linux project were made at COMDEX in November 1999. There were

254-472: A high-level language implementation of Unix made its porting to different computer platforms easier. Due to an earlier antitrust case forbidding it from entering the computer business, AT&T licensed the operating system's source code as a trade secret to anyone who asked. As a result, Unix grew quickly and became widely adopted by academic institutions and businesses. In 1984, AT&T divested itself of its regional operating companies , and

381-424: A minimalist functionality, while more elaborate window managers such as FVWM , Enlightenment , or Window Maker provide more features such as a built-in taskbar and themes , but are still lightweight when compared to desktop environments. Desktop environments include window managers as part of their standard installations, such as Mutter (GNOME), KWin (KDE), or Xfwm (xfce), although users may choose to use

508-516: A solution stack such as LAMP . The source code of Linux may be used, modified, and distributed commercially or non-commercially by anyone under the terms of its respective licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL). The license means creating novel distributions is permitted by anyone and is easier than it would be for an operating system such as MacOS or Microsoft Windows . The Linux kernel, for example,

635-520: 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

762-620: A broad, royalty-free license to all intellectual property rights in the UnitedLinux Software, entitling each member to "use, copy, modify, distribute, market, advertise, sell, offer for sale, sublicense ... in any manner the Software, including the rights to make derivative works of the Software, to provide access to the Source Code and/or Object Code to any third party, to incorporate the Software into other products or bundle

889-599: 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

1016-654: 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

1143-419: A competing OS, agrees that "Linux wasn't designed, it evolved", but considers this to be a limitation, proposing that some features, especially those related to security, cannot be evolved into, "this is not a biological system at the end of the day, it's a software system." A Linux-based system is a modular Unix-like operating system, deriving much of its basic design from principles established in Unix during

1270-527: 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

1397-974: A different window manager if preferred. Wayland is a display server protocol intended as a replacement for the X11 protocol; as of 2022 , it has received relatively wide adoption. Unlike X11, Wayland does not need an external window manager and compositing manager. Therefore, a Wayland compositor takes the role of the display server, window manager, and compositing manager. Weston is the reference implementation of Wayland, while GNOME's Mutter and KDE's KWin are being ported to Wayland as standalone display servers. Enlightenment has already been successfully ported since version 19. Additionally, many window managers have been made for Wayland, such as Sway or Hyprland, as well as other graphical utilities such as Waybar or Rofi. Linux currently has two modern kernel-userspace APIs for handling video input devices: V4L2 API for video streams and radio, and DVB API for digital TV reception. Due to

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1524-518: 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,

1651-569: 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,

1778-605: 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

1905-440: 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

2032-416: 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

2159-622: 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

2286-473: A number of false starts, but the participants consistently agreed that a unified Linux platform for business made sense. The key factors for success were identified early in 2000. Starting in March and April 2002, the United Linux board put together a base technical specification, getting input from the four consortium members and their business partners and vendors. UnitedLinux, LLC was formed May 29, 2002 and

2413-404: A place in server installations such as the popular LAMP application stack. The use of Linux distributions in home and enterprise desktops has been growing. Linux distributions have also become popular in the netbook market, with many devices shipping with customized Linux distributions installed, and Google releasing their own ChromeOS designed for netbooks. Linux's greatest success in

2540-450: A popular CLI shell. The graphical user interface (or GUI) used by most Linux systems is built on top of an implementation of the X Window System . More recently, the Linux community has sought to advance to Wayland as the new display server protocol, in place of X11. Many other open-source software projects contribute to Linux systems. Installed components of a Linux system include the following: The user interface , also known as

2667-572: 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

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2794-682: 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,

2921-481: A significant business around Linux distributions. The free software licenses , on which the various software packages of a distribution built on the Linux kernel are based, explicitly accommodate and encourage commercialization; the relationship between a Linux distribution as a whole and individual vendors may be seen as symbiotic . One common business model of commercial suppliers is charging for support, especially for business users. A number of companies also offer

3048-493: A specialized business version of their distribution, which adds proprietary support packages and tools to administer higher numbers of installations or to simplify administrative tasks. Another business model is to give away the software to sell hardware. This used to be the norm in the computer industry, with operating systems such as CP/M , Apple DOS , and versions of the classic Mac OS before 7.6 freely copyable (but not modifiable). As computer hardware standardized throughout

3175-592: 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

3302-409: 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

3429-972: A system's software from one central location. A distribution is largely driven by its developer and user communities. Some vendors develop and fund their distributions on a volunteer basis, Debian being a well-known example. Others maintain a community version of their commercial distributions, as Red Hat does with Fedora , and SUSE does with openSUSE . In many cities and regions, local associations known as Linux User Groups (LUGs) seek to promote their preferred distribution and by extension free software. They hold meetings and provide free demonstrations, training, technical support, and operating system installation to new users. Many Internet communities also provide support to Linux users and developers. Most distributions and free software / open-source projects have IRC chatrooms or newsgroups . Online forums are another means of support, with notable examples being Unix & Linux Stack Exchange , LinuxQuestions.org and

3556-481: 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

3683-570: 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 ,

3810-402: A user may interact with the application; however, certain extensions of the X Window System are not capable of working over the network. Several X display servers exist, with the reference implementation, X.Org Server , being the most popular. Server distributions might provide a command-line interface for developers and administrators, but provide a custom interface for end-users, designed for

3937-453: A vast body of work and may include both kernel modules and user applications and libraries. Linux vendors and communities combine and distribute the kernel, GNU components, and non-GNU components, with additional package management software in the form of Linux distributions. Many developers of open-source software agree that the Linux kernel was not designed but rather evolved through natural selection . Torvalds considers that although

United Linux - Misplaced Pages Continue

4064-465: 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

4191-522: 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

4318-569: Is licensed under the GPLv2, with an exception for system calls that allows code that calls the kernel via system calls not to be licensed under the GPL. Because of the dominance of Linux-based Android on smartphones , Linux, including Android, has the largest installed base of all general-purpose operating systems as of May 2022 . Linux is, as of March 2024 , used by around 4 percent of desktop computers . The Chromebook , which runs

4445-403: Is that the Linux kernel and other components are free and open-source software. Linux is not the only such operating system, although it is by far the most widely used. Some free and open-source software licenses are based on the principle of copyleft , a kind of reciprocity: any work derived from a copyleft piece of software must also be copyleft itself. The most common free software license,

4572-594: Is the Bourne-Again Shell (bash), originally developed for the GNU Project, other shells such as Zsh are also used. Most low-level Linux components, including various parts of the userland , use the CLI exclusively. The CLI is particularly suited for automation of repetitive or delayed tasks and provides very simple inter-process communication . On desktop systems, the most popular user interfaces are

4699-475: Is typically built into the firmware and is highly tailored to the system. This includes routers , automation controls, smart home devices , video game consoles , televisions (Samsung and LG smart TVs ), automobiles (Tesla, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and Toyota), and spacecraft ( Falcon 9 rocket, Dragon crew capsule, and the Ingenuity Mars helicopter). The Unix operating system

4826-415: Is used on a wide variety of devices including PCs, workstations , mainframes and embedded systems . Linux is the predominant operating system for servers and is also used on all of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers . When combined with Android , which is Linux-based and designed for smartphones , they have the largest installed base of all general-purpose operating systems . The Linux kernel

4953-497: The Free Software Foundation and wrote the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) in 1989. By the early 1990s, many of the programs required in an operating system (such as libraries, compilers , text editors , a command-line shell , and a windowing system ) were completed, although low-level elements such as device drivers , daemons , and the kernel , called GNU Hurd , were stalled and incomplete. Minix

5080-475: The Free Software Foundation uses and recommends the name " GNU/Linux " to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy . Thousands of distributions exist, many based directly or indirectly on other distributions; popular Linux distributions include Debian , Fedora Linux , Arch Linux , and Ubuntu , while commercial distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise . Other than

5207-761: The GNU toolchain , which includes the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and the GNU Build System . Amongst others, GCC provides compilers for Ada , C , C++ , Go and Fortran . Many programming languages have a cross-platform reference implementation that supports Linux, for example PHP , Perl , Ruby , Python , Java , Go , Rust and Haskell . First released in 2003, the LLVM project provides an alternative cross-platform open-source compiler for many languages. Proprietary compilers for Linux include

United Linux - Misplaced Pages Continue

5334-473: The GUI shells , packaged together with extensive Desktop environments , such as KDE Plasma , GNOME , MATE , Cinnamon , LXDE , Pantheon , and Xfce , though a variety of additional user interfaces exist. Most popular user interfaces are based on the X Window System, often simply called "X". It provides network transparency and permits a graphical application running on one system to be displayed on another where

5461-758: The Intel C++ Compiler , Sun Studio , and IBM XL C/C++ Compiler . BASIC is available in procedural form from QB64 , PureBasic , Yabasic , GLBasic , Basic4GL , XBasic , wxBasic , SdlBasic , and Basic-256 , as well as object oriented through Gambas , FreeBASIC , B4X, Basic for Qt , Phoenix Object Basic, NS Basic , ProvideX, Chipmunk Basic , RapidQ and Xojo . Pascal is implemented through GNU Pascal , Free Pascal , and Virtual Pascal , as well as graphically via Lazarus , PascalABC.NET , or Delphi using FireMonkey (previously through Borland Kylix ). SCO Group The SCO Group (often referred to SCO and later called The TSG Group )

5588-469: The Linux kernel , an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds . Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries — many of which are provided by the GNU Project — to create a complete operating system. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but

5715-544: 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

5842-507: 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,

5969-476: The shell , is either a command-line interface (CLI), a graphical user interface (GUI), or controls attached to the associated hardware, which is common for embedded systems. For desktop systems, the default user interface is usually graphical, although the CLI is commonly available through terminal emulator windows or on a separate virtual console . CLI shells are text-based user interfaces, which use text for both input and output. The dominant shell used in Linux

6096-399: The 1970s and 1980s. Such a system uses a monolithic kernel , the Linux kernel, which handles process control, networking, access to the peripherals , and file systems . Device drivers are either integrated directly with the kernel or added as modules that are loaded while the system is running. The GNU userland is a key part of most systems based on the Linux kernel, with Android being

6223-454: The 1980s, it became more difficult for hardware manufacturers to profit from this tactic, as the OS would run on any manufacturer's computer that shared the same architecture. Most programming languages support Linux either directly or through third-party community based ports . The original development tools used for building both Linux applications and operating system programs are found within

6350-674: The GNU General Public License (GPL), is a form of copyleft and is used for the Linux kernel and many of the components from the GNU Project. Linux-based distributions are intended by developers for interoperability with other operating systems and established computing standards. Linux systems adhere to POSIX, SUS , LSB , ISO , and ANSI standards where possible, although to date only one Linux distribution has been POSIX.1 certified, Linux-FT. Free software projects, although developed through collaboration , are often produced independently of each other. The fact that

6477-464: The Linux kernel, key components that make up a distribution may include a display server (windowing system) , a package manager , a bootloader and the Bash shell . Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free and open-source software collaboration. While originally developed for x86 based personal computers , it has since been ported to more platforms than any other operating system, and

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6604-650: The Linux kernel-based ChromeOS , dominates the US K–12 education market and represents nearly 20 percent of sub-$ 300 notebook sales in the US. Linux is the leading operating system on servers (over 96.4% of the top one million web servers' operating systems are Linux), leads other big iron systems such as mainframe computers , and is used on all of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers (as of November 2017 , having gradually displaced all competitors). Linux also runs on embedded systems , i.e., devices whose operating system

6731-613: The Linux kernel. On July 3, 1991, to implement Unix system calls , Linus Torvalds attempted unsuccessfully to obtain a digital copy of the POSIX standards documentation with a request to the comp.os.minix newsgroup . After not finding the POSIX documentation, Torvalds initially resorted to determining system calls from SunOS documentation owned by the university for use in operating its Sun Microsystems server. He also learned some system calls from Tanenbaum's Minix text. Torvalds began

6858-704: The Request that through the MTA and JDC, "the UnitedLinux members agreed that each member would have an irrevocable, perpetual, and worldwide license to use and unlimitedly exploit any intellectual property rights of the other members in the UnitedLinux Software, which would be transferred to the LLC for this very purpose." Novell's motion to stay was granted in part, for those of SCO's claims relating to SuSE. On September 14, 2007, SCO filed for bankruptcy, and on November 13,

6985-501: 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

7112-621: The SUSE division. The stated reason was that the SCO v. IBM lawsuit and The SCO Group's public attacks on Linux had made the alliance unworkable. It emerged that no real work had been done on United Linux since soon after SCO v. IBM had started, and that SUSE had ceased active participation around this time. The last United Linux announcements were of Oracle Corporation support for it on 13 March 2003, and of AMD64 CPU support on 22 April 2003. While some have reported that UnitedLinux ended, in fact

7239-452: 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

7366-633: 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

7493-446: The Software with other products for its own business purposes and any other unlimited right of exploitation"; existing open source licenses, such as the GNU General Public License , also continued to apply. Disputes were to be settled via International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) arbitration. A first beta was released to United Linux member partners on August 14, 2002, a public beta was released on September 25, 2002 and United Linux 1.0

7620-524: 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

7747-411: 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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7874-471: The beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers." Bryan Cantrill , an engineer of

8001-443: 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,

8128-411: 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

8255-458: 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

8382-495: 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

8509-585: 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

8636-542: 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)

8763-447: The complexity and diversity of different devices, and due to the large number of formats and standards handled by those APIs, this infrastructure needs to evolve to better fit other devices. Also, a good userspace device library is the key to the success of having userspace applications to be able to work with all formats supported by those devices. The primary difference between Linux and many other popular contemporary operating systems

8890-498: The consumer market is perhaps the mobile device market, with Android being the dominant operating system on smartphones and very popular on tablets and, more recently, on wearables . Linux gaming is also on the rise with Valve showing its support for Linux and rolling out SteamOS , its own gaming-oriented Linux distribution, which was later implemented in their Steam Deck platform. Linux distributions have also gained popularity with various local and national governments, such as

9017-429: The court ruled at SCO's request that the arbitration was automatically stayed . SuSE filed a motion to lift this stay on November 10, 2009. However, SCO objected on December 15, and SUSE's motion was denied on January 15, 2010. Linux This is an accepted version of this page Linux ( / ˈ l ɪ n ʊ k s / , LIN -uuks ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on

9144-602: 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,

9271-467: The design of Unix served as a scaffolding, "Linux grew with a lot of mutations – and because the mutations were less than random, they were faster and more directed than alpha-particles in DNA ." Eric S. Raymond considers Linux's revolutionary aspects to be social, not technical: before Linux, complex software was designed carefully by small groups, but "Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly

9398-508: The development of 386BSD , from which NetBSD , OpenBSD and FreeBSD descended, predated that of Linux. Linus Torvalds has stated on separate occasions that if the GNU kernel or 386BSD had been available at the time (1991), he probably would not have created Linux. While attending the University of Helsinki in the fall of 1990, Torvalds enrolled in a Unix course. The course used a MicroVAX minicomputer running Ultrix , and one of

9525-532: The development of the Linux kernel on Minix and applications written for Minix were also used on Linux. Later, Linux matured and further Linux kernel development took place on Linux systems. GNU applications also replaced all Minix components, because it was advantageous to use the freely available code from the GNU Project with the fledgling operating system; code licensed under the GNU GPL can be reused in other computer programs as long as they also are released under

9652-476: The development of the components of the system and free software. An analysis of the Linux kernel in 2017 showed that well over 85% of the code was developed by programmers who are being paid for their work, leaving about 8.2% to unpaid developers and 4.1% unclassified. Some of the major corporations that provide contributions include Intel , Samsung , Google , AMD , Oracle , and Facebook . Several corporations, notably Red Hat, Canonical , and SUSE have built

9779-559: The federal government of Brazil . Linus Torvalds is the lead maintainer for the Linux kernel and guides its development, while Greg Kroah-Hartman is the lead maintainer for the stable branch. Zoë Kooyman is the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, which in turn supports the GNU components. Finally, individuals and corporations develop third-party non-GNU components. These third-party components comprise

9906-471: The first version of the Linux kernel on the Internet . Like GNU and 386BSD, Linux did not have any Unix code and therefore avoided any current legal issues . Desktop Linux distributions include a windowing system such as X11 or Wayland and a desktop environment such as GNOME , KDE Plasma or Xfce . Distributions intended for servers may not have a graphical user interface at all or include

10033-460: The group did not gain consensus to dissolve the partnership and the legal entity remains in effect. The SCO v. Novell complaint was amended on February 3, 2006 to add copyright infringement claims, relating to Novell's distribution of SuSE Linux. Novell responded on April 10 by filing a Request for Arbitration with the ICC, and asking that SCO's claims be stayed in the district court. They argued in

10160-547: 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

10287-582: 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

10414-401: 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

10541-404: 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

10668-411: 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

10795-401: 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

10922-516: The mid-1990s in the supercomputing community, where organizations such as NASA started to replace their increasingly expensive machines with clusters of inexpensive commodity computers running Linux. Commercial use began when Dell and IBM , followed by Hewlett-Packard , started offering Linux support to escape Microsoft 's monopoly in the desktop operating system market. Today, Linux systems are used throughout computing, from embedded systems to virtually all supercomputers , and have secured

11049-591: 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

11176-504: 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

11303-627: 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

11430-441: The notable exception. The GNU C library , an implementation of the C standard library , works as a wrapper for the system calls of the Linux kernel necessary to the kernel-userspace interface, the toolchain is a broad collection of programming tools vital to Linux development (including the compilers used to build the Linux kernel itself), and the coreutils implement many basic Unix tools . The GNU Project also develops Bash ,

11557-501: The operating system to their specific needs. Distributions are maintained by individuals, loose-knit teams, volunteer organizations, and commercial entities. A distribution is responsible for the default configuration of the installed Linux kernel, general system security, and more generally integration of the different software packages into a coherent whole. Distributions typically use a package manager such as apt , yum , zypper , pacman or portage to install, remove, and update all of

11684-525: 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

11811-661: The project was announced to the world on May 30, 2002. Two legal agreements were signed by the founding members at this time, the Master Transaction Agreement (MTA) and the Joint Development Contract (JDC); the JDC was also signed by UnitedLinux, LLC. These contracts provided, in part, that intellectual property related to UnitedLinux Software (with certain exceptions) would be assigned to UnitedLinux, LLC. Further, "[e]ach member shall have

11938-680: 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

12065-455: The required texts was Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tanenbaum . This textbook included a copy of Tanenbaum's Minix operating system. It was with this course that Torvalds first became exposed to Unix. In 1991, he became curious about operating systems. Frustrated by the licensing of Minix, which at the time limited it to educational use only, he began to work on his operating system kernel, which eventually became

12192-410: 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

12319-412: The same or a compatible license. Torvalds initiated a switch from his original license, which prohibited commercial redistribution, to the GNU GPL. Developers worked to integrate GNU components with the Linux kernel, creating a fully functional and free operating system. Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention " Freax ", a portmanteau of "free", "freak", and "x" (as an allusion to Unix). During

12446-441: The software licenses explicitly permit redistribution, however, provides a basis for larger-scale projects that collect the software produced by stand-alone projects and make it available all at once in the form of a Linux distribution. Many Linux distributions manage a remote collection of system software and application software packages available for download and installation through a network connection. This allows users to adapt

12573-529: The start of his work on the system, some of the project's makefiles included the name "Freax" for about half a year. Initially, Torvalds considered the name "Linux" but dismissed it as too egotistical. To facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server ( ftp.funet.fi ) of FUNET in September 1991. Ari Lemmke, Torvalds' coworker at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) who

12700-441: 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

12827-471: The use case of the system. This custom interface is accessed through a client that resides on another system, not necessarily Linux-based. Several types of window managers exist for X11, including tiling , dynamic , stacking , and compositing . Window managers provide means to control the placement and appearance of individual application windows, and interact with the X Window System. Simpler X window managers such as dwm , ratpoison , or i3wm provide

12954-559: The various distribution-specific support and community forums, such as ones for Ubuntu , Fedora, Arch Linux , Gentoo , etc. Linux distributions host mailing lists ; commonly there will be a specific topic such as usage or development for a given list. There are several technology websites with a Linux focus. Print magazines on Linux often bundle cover disks that carry software or even complete Linux distributions. Although Linux distributions are generally available without charge, several large corporations sell, support, and contribute to

13081-407: 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 ‍ — ‍

13208-429: The word "Linux" should be pronounced, he included an audio guide with the kernel source code. However, in this recording, he pronounces Linux as /ˈlinʊks/ ( LEEN -uuks ) with a short but close front unrounded vowel , instead of a near-close near-front unrounded vowel as in his newsgroup post. The adoption of Linux in production environments, rather than being used only by hobbyists, started to take off first in

13335-411: 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

13462-417: 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

13589-583: 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

13716-569: 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

13843-407: 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

13970-414: 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

14097-508: Was conceived and implemented in 1969, at AT&T 's Bell Labs , in the United States by Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie , Douglas McIlroy , and Joe Ossanna . First released in 1971, Unix was written entirely in assembly language , as was common practice at the time. In 1973, in a key pioneering approach, it was rewritten in the C programming language by Dennis Ritchie (except for some hardware and I/O routines). The availability of

14224-446: Was created by Andrew S. Tanenbaum , a computer science professor, and released in 1987 as a minimal Unix-like operating system targeted at students and others who wanted to learn operating system principles. Although the complete source code of Minix was freely available, the licensing terms prevented it from being free software until the licensing changed in April 2000. Although not released until 1992, due to legal complications ,

14351-418: 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

14478-510: Was designed by Linus Torvalds , following the lack of a working kernel for GNU , a Unix -compatible operating system made entirely of free software that had been undergoing development since 1983 by Richard Stallman . While a separate working Unix-compatible system called Minix was later released, its license was not entirely free at the time. The first entirely free Unix for personal computers, 386BSD , did not appear until 1992, by which time Torvalds had already built and publicly released

14605-457: 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

14732-459: Was later originally developed, it represented the first successful commercial attempt at distributing a primarily single-user microcomputer that ran a Unix operating system. With Unix increasingly "locked in" as a proprietary product, the GNU Project , started in 1983 by Richard Stallman , had the goal of creating a "complete Unix-compatible software system" composed entirely of free software . Work began in 1984. Later, in 1985, Stallman started

14859-416: 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

14986-480: 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

15113-583: 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

15240-513: Was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name, so he named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting Torvalds. Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux". According to a newsgroup post by Torvalds, the word "Linux" should be pronounced ( / ˈ l ɪ n ʊ k s / LIN -uuks ) with a short 'i' as in 'print' and 'u' as in 'put'. To further demonstrate how

15367-422: Was planned that version 1.0 would take six to eight months to release, be the current version for one year and be supported for another year after the release of 2.0. Minimum technical requirements were: On January 20, 2004, SCO filed a lawsuit , against Novell, the then-current owner of SuSE. The end of United Linux was announced in a Novell press conference on January 22, 2004 by Richard Seibt, president of

15494-604: 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

15621-486: 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

15748-518: Was released from its obligation not to enter the computer business; freed of that obligation, Bell Labs began selling Unix as a proprietary product, where users were not legally allowed to modify it. Onyx Systems began selling early microcomputer-based Unix workstations in 1980. Later, Sun Microsystems , founded as a spin-off of a student project at Stanford University , also began selling Unix-based desktop workstations in 1982. While Sun workstations did not use commodity PC hardware, for which Linux

15875-484: Was released on November 19, 2002. For a detailed case study in what led one of the four partners to embrace the ideals of United Linux see Caldera OpenLinux . The distribution was based on SUSE Linux and the Linux Standard Base , with the plan being for SUSE to do most of the engineering work and SCO , Turbolinux and Conectiva primarily to market the distribution in their territories and markets. It

16002-413: 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

16129-450: 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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