SCO Group

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The SCO Group, Inc. (TSG, informally SCO; NASDAQ: [SCOX]) is a software company formerly called Caldera Systems and Caldera International. After acquiring Santa Cruz Operation's Server Software and Services divisions, as well as UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, the company changed its focus to UNIX. Later on Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group to reflect that change in focus.

It was part of the Canopy Group, but became independent after the settlement of a lawsuit between the Noorda family and a chairman of the group, Ralph Yarro, also CEO of the Canopy Group.

Contents

1 History
2 Products
3 The Linux Wars

3.1 List of recent SCO lawsuits
3.2 Timeline

4 References
5 External links

5.1 Data
5.2 Charts

History

See Caldera OpenLinux for a more detailed history of Caldera Systems/Caldera International.

Caldera Systems, based in Utah, was founded in 1994 by Ransom Love, and received start-up funding from Ray Noorda. Its main product was Caldera OpenLinux, a Linux distribution mainly targeted at business customers and containing some proprietary additions.

In 2000, Caldera acquired several UNIX properties from the Santa Cruz Operation, including OpenServer and UnixWare, proprietary operating systems for PCs that would be expected to compete directly with Linux.

In 2002, Caldera joined with SuSE Linux, Turbolinux and Conectiva to form United Linux in an attempt to standardize Linux distributions. Later that year, CEO Ransom Love left the company and was replaced by Darl McBride.

Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group that year.

In 2003, SCO began to claim that Linux contained large amounts of its intellectual property. SCO filed suit against IBM and demanded that Linux end-users pay license fees. A new division called SCOsource was created to licence the company's intellectual property. These claims provoked outrage among Linux-users, who denied that Linux had copied anything belonging to SCO, and a lawsuit against SCO by Linux-distributor RedHat. Novell, from whom SCO claimed to have acquired its Unix IP, announced that it had not sold the copyrights to SCO and that it retained them. In response, SCO sued Novell for slander of title.

Subsequently, the SCO Group sued two former customers (Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler). SCO claims Autozone violated SCO's copyrights by using Linux. SCO did not go this far with Daimler-Chrysler. Instead, SCO claimed that Daimler-Chrysler breached a section of a UNIX licensing contract that required Daimler-Chrysler to respond to requests for certification by SCO. Daimler-Chrysler, when allegedly faced with such a request, did not respond. However, SCO also speculated that DaimlerChrysler broke the licensing agreement when they moved to the Linux operating system and that this is the reason why they refused to certify. SCO tried to make these lawsuits appear an action for being linux users [link] when they were in fact related to contracts between the companies. SCO's suit against Daimler-Chrysler was dismissed in 2004.

SCO quickly became a bad word among rank-and-file Linux users. After announcing its legal claims against various Linux users and vendors, (see The Linux Wars below), the company suspended sales and development of its Linux related products. Attention was shifted to the Unixware and OpenServer UNIX products previously acquired from the Santa Cruz Operation.

Products

SCO UnixWare, a modern UNIX operating system. UnixWare 2.x and below were direct descendants of Unix System V Release 4.2 and was originally developed by AT&T, Univel, Novell and later on Santa Cruz Operation. UnixWare 7 was sold as a "best of breed" UNIX OS combining UnixWare 2 and OpenServer 5 and was based on System V Release 5. UnixWare 7.1.2 was branded OpenUNIX 8, but later releases returned to the UnixWare 7.1.x name and version numbering.
SCO OpenServer, another UNIX operating system, which was originally developed by Santa Cruz Operation. SCO OpenServer 5 was a descendant of SCO UNIX, which is in turn a descendent of XENIX. SCO OpenServer 6 is, in fact, an OpenServer compatibility environment running on UnixWare.
Smallfoot, an operating system and GUI created specifically for point of sale applications.
SCOx Web Services Substrate, a web services-based framework for modernizing legacy applications.
WebFace, a development environment for rich-UI browser-based Internet applications.
SCOoffice Server, an e-mail and collaboration solution.

In late 2004, SCO announced the launch of the SCO Marketplace Initiative (http://www.sco.com/developers/marketplace/faq.html), in which it offers pay-per-project development opportunities.
In early 2006, SCO publicly released Me, Inc, a mobile services platform. (http://www.sco.com/products/meinc/ )

The Linux Wars

Main article: SCO-Linux controversies

The SCO Group is currently involved in a dispute with various Linux vendors and users. In this campaign SCO asserts that Linux violates some of SCO's intellectual property. Although many are skeptical about their claims, SCO initiated a series of lawsuits and claims that, if upheld by the courts, may impact the future of both Linux and Unix. While making numerous public assertions that Linux infringes upon their copyrights, the lawsuits themselves concern contractual issues which are tangential to the issue of whether or not Linux infringes any copyrights. Further complicating the issue is the legitimacy of SCO claims concerning the ownership of SVR4 Unix copyrights. The success or failure of the claims will also have a profound effect on the financial future of The SCO Group, itself. SCO has, to date, made little headway in this dispute. In particular, in February 2005, Judge Kimball, the Judge in the SCO v. IBM case has stated:

The SCO Group, Inc. vs. International Business Machines, Inc. case number 2:03cv0294 United States District Court for the District of Utah doc #398 [link]

List of recent SCO lawsuits

There was also a related lawsuit in which the group was involved known as the Yarro case

Timeline

On June 28, 2002 Darl McBride became the CEO of SCO, soon thereafter the company pursued litigation against IBM and Linux. McBride accused Linux of containing "line-by-line" copies of SCO's proprietary source code in apparent contradiction to the subsequent Davidson email. [link]

On February 17, 2005 the SCO Group issued a press release that stated their stock may soon be delisted from NASDAQ for failing to issue an annual 10-K report in a timely manner as required by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulations. [link] In late April of 2005, after complying with the filing requirements, the NASDAQ switched trading of the SCO Group from "SCOXE" back to their original "SCOX" stock symbol.

On July 1, 2005, federal judge Dale A. Kimball denied The SCO Group's motion to amend their claim against IBM yet another time (a 3rd amended complaint) and include new claims regarding Monterey on the PowerPC architecture. In the same decision, the 5-week jury trial date was set for February 2007 [link]

On July 14, 2005, Groklaw obtained [link] an email [link] from Michael Davidson to SCO Group senior VP Reginald Broughton sent on August 13, 2002. In it, Davidson describes the Santa Cruz Operation's own investigation into whether or not Linux contained proprietary UNIX source code. "At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever," Davidson concluded. At which time SCO presented as evidence an e-mail from a Robert Swartz, a consultant hired by SCO to compare UNIX and Linux source files, that copyright infringement could exist.

References

External links

Data

Charts

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