Slashdot Mirror

(a long long time ago in a land far far away...)

A company called The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) had a product called SCO Unix, and owned many of the original copyrights on UNIX from the AT&T System V days (how they got there is not important). The market for their product was not wonderful, so they created a product called Tarantella http://www.tarantella.com/ and decided to sell the UNIX part of the business. With that went the SCO name, and the old Santa Cruz Operation was forever to be called Tarantella... that is, untill they were purchased by old UNIX buddy Sun Microsystems...

The company that bought the UNIX stuff (and the SCO name) was a little Linux outfit called Caldera... which is now called... SCO

so the irony here is that a company that got it's start packaging and selling Linux buys the UNIX copyrights and uses them to threaten former competiters in the Linux space...

sad really, if you ask me (not that you did)

Just found this at http://www.tarantella.com/

          09.28.05 Sun Secure Global Desktop Software 4.2 is now available for download

This product of Sun's is definitely an enterprise-level competitor (and really hits the sweet spot when used with their thin-client products).

Lots of stuff, some might not have what you are looking for... But hey, sift through these, and see if there is anything of interest :-)

Genuit's ThinWorx
Tarantella
Provision Networks
HOB
Prospero
Win4Lin
Konect
GraphOn's GO-Global

HTH :)

Solaris, at least, yes. See http://www.tarantella.com/

I wonder if they'll be using Tarantella, which Sun aquired recently.

Sun recently bought a company that claims to allow Windows and Linux apps to be used over Java clients.

http://www.tarantella.com/

They announced last quarter financials today. At the rate they were losing money they would be bust at the end of June. No wonder they wanted the payments from Sun. And the shareholders would be silly not to take the 90 cents per share rather than the 0 cents they would get in 7 weeks time.

Sun announced plans to acquire Tarantella, Inc., a leading provider of secure application access software based in Santa Cruz, CA. [...] Sun plans to use Tarantella technology to provide customers with a higher level of secure mobile access to data and applications.

As part of the agreement, Sun will acquire the Secure Global Desktop family of products, which enables organizations to access and manage information, data, and applications across virtually all devices, networks, and platforms [...]

The software employs a flexible and secure three-tier architecture deployed on Solaris OS or Linux. Secure Global Desktop enables applications to be displayed using native protocols without the need for specialized software - a Web browser and Java technology is all that's necessary on the client device or application server.[...]

Most importantly, the software will enable you to present a variety of applications on Sun Ray thin clients -- including those written to Microsoft Windows.

Jonathan Schwartz comments at Acquistions Accelerate Microsoft Interoperability
Tarentella is here

My question is "How is this different from NoMachine's NX Server?"

The Open Source Region Stuttgart is using a proprietary non Open Source tool from Tarantella, a company previously know as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).
Tarantella is now being bought by Sun.

Isn't Tarantella the old sco, before the name got sold?

This is just a remote connection to a Linux server using the Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition from Tarantella.

Is it a coincidence that Sun just announced yesterday they are buying Tarentella?

This is just a remote connection to a Linux server using the Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition from Tarantella.

Is it a coincidence that Sun just announced yesterday they are buying Tarentella?

This is just a remote connection to a Linux server using the Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition from Tarantella.

Is it a coincidence that Sun just announced yesterday they are buying Tarentella?

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. At that time Caldera changed its name to "Caldera International", and the remaining part of SCO, the Tarantella Division, changed its name to "Tarantella, Inc."

In August 2002 Caldera International renamed itself "The SCO Group" since the SCO UNIX products were still a strong source of revenue mainly due to the huge installation base dating back to the 1990s. It is this SCO Group, formerly known as Caldera, and not the former Santa Cruz Operation now known as Tarantella, that sued IBM in 2003 for $1 billion for allegedly "devaluing" Unix by contributing to the Unix-like Linux operating system.

For whatever reason Citrix does not seem to want to make a Linux version of MetaFrame Presentation Server for UNIX. For those who think X11 is good enough try running it over a dial-up line sometime. Suddenly MPSU looks a lot better (it's also better than e.g. using Exceed on a Windows box on a LAN).

However, one of Citrix's competitors does support Linux. Have you looked into Tarantella? Might be what you are looking for.

Let's face it, ever since Douggy's Dad had to resign for sexually harrassing the staff, SCO has had the whiff of being a shitty little disreputable bunch of corner crack monkeys lucky enough to be sitting on a product that people would actually pay to make and improve for them.

This SCO is not the company formerly known as the Santa Cruz Operation. That company sold its Unix operation to Caldera and then renamed itself Tarantella after its current main product.

Caldera renamed itself to The SCO Group and then decided that they wern't a Linux company anymore, they were a Unix company. Of course, they aren't a Unix company anymore either - they only seem to exit to sue other companies now.

Tarantella's been around for years doing remote/ low bandwith X11 and is worth checking out too.

No. That is the new SCO. The old SCO became Tarantella and is still happily producing software, albeit not Unix.

SCO's chance to succeed vanished before The Santa Cruz Operation split into Tarantella and The SCO Group. There is no SCO, it's TSG. It's a shame it's called SCO.

The Unix-producing part of SCO was doomed, and it's likely that this strategy was considered back at the time of the split. Otherwise it would have made more sense to just sell off SCO's Unix assets and either rename the whole remainder of the company to Tarantella or keep the S.C.O. name, laying off the Unix developers. (Not that I would wish that on any of those people, some of whom I know and regard highly.)

Bear in mind that this is not the same company. The company formerly known as The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. is now known as Tarantella Inc. The company now known as Litigious Bastards oops I mean The SCO Group, Inc. is what used to be not Litigious Bastards I mean Caldera Systems Inc.

well they're not thriving anymore. It's kind of sad really, SCO use to be contender.Don't they have a spot secured on the UNIX timeline along with ATT and the others somewhere? Too bad mgmnt/greed/stupidity/etc got in the way. oh well, you know what they say, out with the old in with the nucleus.

In this case, very literally out with the old. This company isn't the historical SCO at all, but rather an offshoot of the Linux company Caldera, renamed to SCO after buying many of that original company's Unix assets.

The original SCO lives on renamed to Tarantella -- which was basically their only profitable software product at the time of the sale.

not to mention the destroyed reputation...

The insiders are getting wealthy off of stock options and the lawyers are making a bundle off the legal wranglings. Left holding the bag are the stockholders and investors, notably Baystar, whose $50 million investment has lost more than half its original value already. The options are part of the problem, since they dilute the stock, and the loss of reputation and the court case will finish off the rest.

In the end, SCO will lose its court cases as expected and declare bankruptcy. The companies officers and lawyers will walk away with piles of cash and the remaining IP and products (yes, SCO has some IP and products) will be sold off to the highest bidder. But this all looks like it was part of the plan to extract money from a company which could no longer produce a viable business.

The old SCO sold their properties to Caldera and went bye-bye. Not quite correct. The old SCO realized pushing Unix was a doomed proposition, sold part of their properties to Caldera, and changed it's name to Tarantella (the dance, not the spider), which was the name of the old SCO's middleware product.

• 2001 On May 7, Caldera Systems completes the acquisition of SCO's Server Software and Professional Services Divisions, becoming Caldera International (Caldera) and providing the world's largest Linux/UNIX channel.

• 2002 Caldera names a new CEO, Darl McBride.

• 2002 Caldera changes its name to The SCO Group (SCO), returning to the SCO brand.

No, The SCO Group failed to understand the ramifications of the Asset Purchase Agreement that was signed between Novell and the Santa Cruz Operation, a separate company. Caldera bought the Operating Systems division of the latter, and then changed their name. Confusing the names is their First Line of Misdirection.

No, Pod SCO only bought the operating systems division from Classic SCO. Classic SCO is now known as Tarentella.

Ummm...you meant Lindon, right? SCO sold the operating systems divisons to Caldera (and presumably the SCO moniker), and changed their name to Tarantella in 2001.

Tarantella History

Originally SCO stood for "Santa Cruz Operation".

Eventually, SCO sold off its OS division, the one that made SCO UNIX and coincidentally happened at the time to own the original Unix copyrights (having bought them from Novell in 1995), to Caldera, a linux company. The remainder of what used to be SCO, the part Caldera didn't buy, is still operating under the name Tarantella.

Caldera, after buying SCO UNIX, changed its name to "The SCO Group." SCO doesn't stand for anything here. It's just "The SCO Group". Shortly after this the company's co-founder, Ransom Love, was replaced as CEO by Darl McBride, and SCO began to serve the Wyrm.

"The SCO Group" is owned by and has since Caldera's inception basically been under the auspices of an umbrella corporation called the Canopy Group. It has been repeatedly theorized that somewhere about the time McBride came in, the Canopy Group gave up on ever making any money ever again on Caldera's projects. Now, goes the theory, the Canopy Group is using the SCO group for no purpose other than as a front/shell company, so that the Canopy Group can engage in illegal but profitable enterprises such as slander, barratry, and fraud, and then when all hell breaks loose as a result and the countersuits start rolling in, "the SCO Group" gets all the blame and takes all the damage and quietly goes bankrupt, and the Canopy Group walks away scot-free.

Don't forget tarantella, from our friends SCO.
Pretty decent performance, much better than plain X. Besides, if you're stuck on a windows machine you don't need to get a (usually buggy) X server installed locally.
www.tarantella.com

The original SCO still exists.

bacchusrx.

This is impossible, because SCO was Caldera, and Caldera's entire business was distributing Linux.

Let's remember that "SCO" is just a name now. Everything else that used to be "SCO" is now Tarantella.

no, I doubt it, I understand that any of the SCO developers worth keeping went with Tarantella to have an opertunity to work on something that was commercialy viable and interesting. SCO (pre-caldera) thought unix without hardware a lame horse that needed a bullet to the head. If the new SCO had been smart they'd just sat back and collected license royalties, i.e. put the lame horse out to pasture and stud service, maybe change themselves into a software distributing/licensing company sort of like a RIAA for software, but they blew it.

The current DR DOS website isn't SCO's. When Lineo, the embedded systems spinoff from Caldera that was given ownership of DR DOS, collapsed, its CEO reformed a new company called DeviceLogics, and they purchased DR DOS from the Canopy Group.

This CEO--Bryan Sparks--really seemed to be the "prime mover" behind Caldera in its early days, even more than Ransom Love (who I think caught flak from the Linux community that he may not have completely deserved). It's worth keeping in mind that the current "SCO" has pretty much zero in common with either the original Caldera or the original SCO . I'd be surprised if there are many--if any--engineers there now who were at either original firm five years ago, and it doesn't seem that any executives have been with SCO since before 2000.

At any rate, the chances are that when DeviceLogics bought the IP for DR DOS, they didn't inherit any legal claims--the suit over Microsoft's practices against DR DOS was settled by Caldera. What you're noticing isn't a sign of conspiracy; it's a sign of irrelevance, at least from a corporate standpoint. (When you're trying to promote a "new" DOS for embedded systems, "we got into a big legal fight with Microsoft" isn't honestly much of a selling point.)

I keep seeing this "Microsoft may be behind this!" thread throughout discussion of SCO, and it's worth pointing out, in bold capitals, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE FOR THIS. Yes, SCO and Microsoft had a "connection" in the past, in that Microsoft sold their Unix clone, Xenix, to SCO. So what? They weren't a Microsoft partner, they were a Microsoft dumping ground. And again, the current SCO isn't that SCO. The original SCO is what became Tarantella; they sold off their Unix to Caldera, just like Microsoft sold off Xenix to them (and for much the same reason--they perceived it was a dying product).

Check out Tarantella . Similar to Citrix MetaFrame, but less expensive, and runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX.

To the best of my knowledge, that bit about the API calls is incorrect. Remote Desktop (gotta love Microsoft's way of turning common terminology into product names) uses the RDP 5.1 protocol, an incremental update to RDP 5.0, the remote display protocol used by Windows Terminal Service in Windows 2000. Version 5.1 adds some goodies like an audio channel, a serial channel, and better compression, but it's still basically a remote display protocol like RFB, ICA, or AIP.

Well, Tarantella is still alive and kicking. And on my UnixWare server I have (and often use) the highly useful Webtop.

Thin-client technology in the Windows world is getting pretty robust these days, between Microsoft's Terminal Services, Citrix Metaframe and competitiors like Tarantella and New Moon's Canaveral.

Also, Citrix Metaframe for Unix allows you to run Unix apps remotely using the ICA protocol, which is a bit "thinner" than X11.

So using one of the products above, a several of which have clients for PocketPC, you can run Windows or Unix apps. No sweat. To take it one step further, you can serve up the apps to the thin-client server using something like Softricity's SoftGrid which "virtualizes" the applications - they run in a little OS "bubble" so you don't actually have to install them on your app server - so you won't have old crappy legacy apps stomping on eachother when you run them on the same box.

I hope this company has a few more tricks, because I don't see anything new or special in their products.

-Jeff

I know there is a Tarantella client for the 9210. I assume it will work on the 9290. Anyone know for sure?

Both Citrix ICA and Tarantella do this. Citrix is proven on the Windows platform and is all in all a nice program. we have had great success with it here. there are plugins and clients for Linux, Solaris, Apple, and others. Tarantella i know less about, but its server runs on multiple OS, and has clients for several as well. Both applications give you a full remote desktop over the network on local clients or web plugins. they run on a server, so you can have several users on the same server doing different things at the same time. they also scale well and have load-balancing built in (citrix does anyway). they also provice straight up remote application support. These programs are much better than VNC for a remote-desktop purpose -- VNC is bad over slow connections and handles images and screen-redraws horribly. It would be really nasty to develop anything over it. and then there is the whole problem of multiple users, and what if my connection dies and i forget to lock my desktop? its just not worth the risk.

just my $0.02. hope this helps....

The reason the Sunrays are quiet is because they consume relatively little power. I have seen investment banks changing form PCs to Sunrays because of the heat and air conditioning issues - each trader can run up to 6 screens, and if he/she has six PC base units under his/her desk that's a lot of heat.

And as far as software is concerned, a Sunray is a vanilla Solaris environment which equals free StarOffice. Work out what Sun's doing with Staroffice licensing ...

And if you put the Sunray clients and smartcards together with Tarantella, you have an environment you can use in the office on the Sunray, at home via your laptop/ISP, in the internet cafe via the java client in a browser ... a true follow-me desktop.

Dunstan

Not true. Check out Tarantella Enterprise.

Sun can't market StarOffice6 unless you can buy it from somewhere. There will be loads and loads and loads of home users and small businesses who will come to StarOffice because it is being marketed. They will see the adverts, and then the next time they're wandering round PC World with a few quid burning a hole in their pocket, they'll cough for a copy.

Having bought it, they'll install it. Then they'll start boring their workmates about it - they're not clever enough to experiment with GNU/Linux, so they'll show off to their colleagues about how clever they are to be using StarOffice. (These are the same people who bore you about the processor speed of their new machine, but don't know what chipset is running on their mobo).

You'll hear them in the office "blah blah blah blah StarOffice blah blah blah really very good, only $50 blah blah blah Microsoft better buck their ideas up blah blah blah".

And you can feel smug about having sent them a document which you wrote on OpenOffice on GNU/Linux, and they think they're clever to be able to read it (because they pressed "Next" a few times).

Never foget how stupid, vain and banal the people are that Sun are aiming at.

Dunstan

PS a quick word on the Solaris version being free - this, of course, isn't aimed at Solaris workstation users, rather at businesses who are considering deploying Sunray solutions, so after buying the servers, network infrastructure and appliances, you don't have to pay software royalties for running an office suite. Add in a Tarantella infrastructure, and you can work on the same desktop on the SunRay in the office, or in a browser at the internet cafe.

It's all starting to come together.

Your first step is to face a simple nasty fact: you will not find a third-party tool that lets you edit your Frame files. Lots of vendors claim to have foolproof filters for WP formats, but it's all smoke and mirrors. The formats are too complicated, and there's no simple mapping between them. So you only have two choices: find a way to continue using Frame, or make a big one-time conversion of all your files into another format.

The first choice is one I personally would avoid, mainly because I really dislike Frame. But it might be more practical. There are various ways you might go about this: buy everybody VMWare licenses and use it to run the Windows version of Frame. Keep some of your SGI boxes around just to run Frame. (Since Unix Frame is an X app, you should be able to run it remotely. If this doesn't work, there's always terminal servers.) Or run Windows Frame on top of WINE.

In your position, I'd prefer to get away from Frame's proprietary format once and for all. Yes, I know, I just said that foolproof filters don't exist. But if you're willing to invest the effort (a lot of effort, I'm afraid) you can use advanced tools to do a one-time conversion.

The leading tool for this is Webworks Publisher. A limited version, which might be adequate for this task, is provided with FrameMaker 6.0. Pick a convenient XML schema, define a mapping between that schema and various Frame styles and formats, and there you are.

Once you have your documents in XML, you have a lot more options. You'll probably have to do a second transformation to a format of your choice. Why? Two reasons. First, the big XML authoring vendors seem to have no interest in Linux. (You might find something from a small vendor or in Open Source. But I've been thoroughly underwealmed by the offerings I've seen.) Second, your users will probably balk at becomming markup wonks. Not everybody want to think about document structure every time they dash off a memo.

Fortunately transforming XML into other formats is not a big deal.

Advocates of Abiword and similar programs will protest. Abiword uses XML as a native format. Why not just go directly from Frame to that format?

The problem is that the Abiword schema is a "data" schema -- it's all one big packet of rich text, with no attempt to isolate formatting. It's like RTF or MIF, only easier to parse. So when you transform something into Abiword XML, you're going to lose any information that Abiword doesn't know how to manage.

But Abiword might be a good choice anyway. It claims to have an XML/Docbook filter. If that woirks half-decently, you can transform your frame files into XML/Docbook (which is a very rich format, so you'd probably lose very little information). Keep your legacy files in that format, and import them into Abiword as needed. If Abiword proves unable to handle some of your more complex files, you can look at other alternatives.

Which is the great beauty of XML. If your current XML app isn't working out, there's always another one.

Which is not to say that XML is a magic bullet. XML transformations are tricky. A lot of XML technology is still under development. And, as Abiword and HTML demonstrate, you can't assume that you have the full power of markup flexability just because your documents use XML or SGML syntax.

While I've not tried it, I don't see any reason that a PC with PS/2 mouse and keyboard, two VGA cards, and a USB mouse and keyboard, couldn't be configured to do exactly the same; run 2 X servers, one configured for the first video card and PS/2 mouse, keyboard, the second for the second video card and USB mouse and keyboard. (you may be able to use several USB mice and keyboards, in order to get as many heads as you can fit video cards in for). As ever, the pig is setting it up.

Of course, you'd need a second sound card for seperate audio, but again that's not too hard.

As for the suggestion that you could do that with X11, well, I laughed when I read that. That's exactly what X and XDMCP is designed for! Have you never heard of X terminals (not xterms)?

When X was developed, the idea was to have lots of thin X terminals and then one big beefy UNIX box to run the applications. Then windows and PCs came along, and they didn't run apps over the network (or at least not until recently).

When I was at college, I had my PC running Linux as a single head, and an NCD X terminal which I'd scrounged from my brother in my room, and in the college's computer room they had some old HP workstation being used as an X terminal. I could easily have 3 people running web browsers, e-mail and news through the one PC (+2 dumb X terminals)

Both of these X terminals were cut-down custom made machines which booted over the network, ran an X server, and broadcasted XDM/CP for any hosts that wanted to offer them a session. It presents a list of machines running XDM, and you simply double click on one, and you get a login screen. Main problem is that both of these "thin terminals" were crap - fixed resolution (at 1280x1024, so usable), but only 8 bit colour depth. Of course, a PC with no hard drive and a decent graphics card would make a better X terminal. NCD still make them - here's a more modern and useful X terminal

The problem is though, that bandwidth over the network is very much less than you get on a PCI or AGP bus - not enough for comfortably doing very graphics intensive stuff with.(back then, I was using 10Mbit, but there are still problems at 100Mbit). Fine for checking e-mail, reading news, even web browsing, but 2D graphics was painful. 3D graphics would be as well - remember that to use things like the renderer extension, (i.e. any fancy 3D GL stuff, or alpha-blending), requires the application to run on the same host as the video card is in, as the app talks directly to the video card; X is only used for the windowing bit, and for drawing basic stuff like text and buttons.

Really, to do this properly requires compressing the X traffic, like lbx or (plug) Tarantella, otherwise it's unusable.

Not my experience here in the UK, where every Sun office seems to be MS free. I think there are Windows laptops around, but presentations are given with StarOffice presentations (and a request for a copy of the slides results in a email with SO attachment). At version 5, SO is still a proprietary format, but the version 6 betas render it just fine.

OO is a serious play for Sun - it will be a significant lever in getting SunRay onto desktops in place of PeeSee's. The next couple of years will *finally* see the thin client breakthrough where significant businesses (or significant parts of significant businesses) will become MS free with tarantella (www.tarantella.com) being an important integration tools for "Legacy Windows Applications" (God it feels good typing that).

Widespread adoption of OO over MS Office also has the benefit of starving MS of cash, which for Sun is also A Good Thing. I would call that sound business strategy rather than playing politics.

Dunstan

• people wanting to use Windows apps
• people wanting to use Linux apps
• people wanting to use a Windows desktop machine
• people wanting to use a Linux desktop machine

I can't answer for anyone other solutions, but Tarantella Vision2K *says* it has support for both RX and LBX. As for the ASP part, I know of at least one that is using Tarantella. Whether they're putting RX/LBX to good use, I wouldn't know...

A quote from their "About Us" page: Tarantella, Inc. was incorporated as a business enterprise of The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. in July 2000.

So, looks like the article's author was correct in predicting a Tarantella spin-off.