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Caldera Close To Buying SCO Unix
So much happened yesterday that this story sorta slipped through the
cracks: Is
Caldera Buying SCO? I don't know which company I consider less relevant (Don't flame me! I simply don't know anyone who runs either SCO or Caldera! No that isn't an invitation for both of you to e-mail me and complain!) but it is a pretty strange pairing.
He's such a moron :]
Donno what is the status now about that domain name, but Collab.net announced that they will buy it from Caldera.
Hetz (Heunique)
Amen. About 92-93 timeframe, I was still in school, and the CS department was getting tired of the donated AT&T 3B2's they were using. Someone decided to buy three new Pentium I machines, with SCO. As you said, no C compiler...which pretty much made those new machines useless to a bunch of CS majors. Those machines ran Slackware as soon as we got our hands on it...
The coolest part was when a professor needed FORTRAN for a research project, and was having trouble getting time on a mainframe. Turned out GNU Fortran was on the Slackware distro, and he was able to complete his project on one of our Linux boxes. (He didn't need speed, he just needed FORTRAN.)
SCO reminds me of Microsoft...lots of money for the OS, then lots more money for development tools so you can actually build stuff. Then even more money for documentation and licensing. Blech.
(I know, I'm preaching to the choir...but SCO's lack of included tools is what got me into Linux in the first place.)
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Of course we know that this rumor is true, because Apple was bought by Disney last week, on the same day that Sun merged with Oracle.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You know, that may be one of the worst logos (the caldera one) I have ever seen. It only now dawned on me that it was a red "c" in a blue globe.
I had always seen it as a blue mickey-mouse ear on a red globe. This is probably why I have had such a hard time taking them seriously -- I've been getting submliminal messages of "Disney Linux" every time I see it.
And for all those reasons you outline above, I really smiled when I saw that SCO was having trouble.
I know it's not nice, but I felt a deep sense of justice. The company that wouldn't sell an inexpensive copy of Unix to a poor college student is having trouble - boo hoo.
On the other hand, I was genuinely sad when Mark Williams Corp. went out of business.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I wonder if all the Caldera people will release all SCO code under GPL or keep it under their (SCO's) current restrictive license.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Other distros are catching up, but Caldera's install and GUI admin tools (eg COAS) make it a much better system for folks who just want to use it to get work done rather than geeks that like to tweak.
I ran it (Open Linux 2.1 and 2.2) for a while (I've since been a pretty steady SuSE user) and I've installed it and recommended it at/to a number of places with little 'nix expertise instead of NT machines for miscellaneous server duties. (Eg my daughter's school, a small mostly-Windows business, various individuals.)
Come to think of it, my personal 'net server (ajwm.net and a couple of other domains) is running Caldera (on a 486!) since I never saw any need to change it. (I use SuSE for development.)
Mind, lately Caldera seems to be targetting less the individual user and more businesses (so the SCO deal may make some sense.)
-- Alastair
This make perfect sense for Caldera. Before Corel came in, they were the ones in the US market pushing their release of Linux as business-oriented. By buying SCO, they can
a) call their release of Linux UNIX (which
might, of course, slide over to cover
every release);
b) gain a *large* customer base (for example,
I happen to know Walgreen's uses SCO), and
c) would let the SCO folks migrate to Linux,
which might be what's happening, anyway,
esp. since SCO has announced support for
Linux, but might make it easier, and gain
more upper mgmt support.
Think, 20 years ago, of IBM and DEC.
mark
I tried to do a network install of Caldera on a POS terminal. No CD-ROM reader. I couldn't get it to work. Sucked down a redhat CD-ROM, did a network install, and it's running fine. Now if I could only get the LCD to run at 800x600, and figure out why /dev/ttyS4 is returning EOF, AND decode the touch panel's serial output, I'd be all set to run X.
-russ
p.s. It's Javelin's Wedge P.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Hmmm, I seem to remember that SCO is the owner of the UNIX trademark.
Linux has up to now been called unix-ish because designing something to be POSIX compatible makes a system behave very unixy anyway. However the real UNIX trademark is based on money, not just compatibility. Maybe the Caldera move will actually enable us to call it UNIX, in the same way that Solaris, AIX and HPUX are all UNIX.
also...
SCO also owns a lot of intellectual property which whilst a lot of it has been re-engineered as open source there are a few things that would give Caldera an edge.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
I've not been particularly impressed with either company and rather hope that they both die off to completely eliminate the chance of me having to deal with some client who's stuck on using their products in the future. Of course, my hatred of SCO has a much more personal note as I've actually had to deal with them in the past. They're not a pleasant company to deal with, from their confusing price schemes to their ineffective technical support. While I really couldn't care less one way or another about Caldera, I'll be dancing on SCO's grave.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
For one thing, SCO has Tarantella, a nifty multi-OS graphical-terminal-server technology similar to Citrix's MetaFrame. For another thing, SCO's Unix has some nice innards that would be nice to get hold of, although as others have noted, some of those pieces may end up being sold off separately to a company like Sun.
But more importantly, probably, SCO has an estblished professional sales force and field offices, and a Rolodex full of current paying customers at medium-to-large companies that have both server and desktop deployments of Unix on x86 hardware. Caldera's desktop and server Linux distros target SCO's traditional markets directly, more so than any other Linux distro, and they're probably looking to set up more field sales offices and build up their sales force.
Sounds like a sensible move to me.
Yes, I was a little surprised the first time I heard that myself. But the UNIX trademark is now owned by OpenGroup, and any OS that passes the UNIX certification tests (API compatibilities, required utilities, etc.) is qualified to brand itself a UNIX. OS/390 qualified a year or so back. (And it's probably the only UNIX around that uses EBCDIC (or for that matter anything but ASCII) as its native character set.
(Most Linux distros almost qualify, the main problems being some slight differences in GNU utilities vs the UNIX flavor -- plus the fact that it costs money to go through the cert process.)
Mostly it means that any portably-written UNIX program will build and run on any such OS.
-- Alastair
You're very right. Every time someone posts an opinion, it is (and should be) an invitation for anyone who disagrees to state their own contrasting opinion. By stating that he does not want to be flamed for his opinion, it seems to me that he doesn't want to have his time wasted by people who don't agree with him. I understand that his job at /. involves recieving an avalanche of e-mail every day and it probably gets overwhelming and very frustrating, but as with every branch of the media, if you make your opinion public, you should expect the public to have something to say about your opinion.
I know a few people who run Caldera, and I have about as much respect for SCO as the typical Slashdot reader (i.e. none) but I think that SCO is (or rather, was) a much more relevant company than Caldera. Before Linux/*BSD hit the mainstream (for the backend, I mean, not the desktop) SCO was the forerunner in x86 UNIX.
'course, I'm not sorry to see them go. They're a bunch of assholes.
--
Microsoft has already been in closed door negotiations with sco - the release of Windows due sometime in 2003 will have sco/linux undertones with a seperate GUI (Windows) Of course, it will all _BE_ GUI, but a fullscreen command prompt that pops up when you log in will make it seem like you're running a real os.
What would Caldera do with SCO? Keep it UnixWare separate product like Sun did with StarOffice? Or merge it completely with varying success, like Apple/NeXT?
Another question: if it was kept separate, you think Caldera would open-source it? IMHO Caldera is not the biggest open-source advocate (using the famous iso-image redistribution method; NOT EVERYONE HAS A CDR! and yes, I know losetup) but would UnixWare end up being open-sourced? (I doubt free)
This would also be a good chance, if it was open-sourced, to see how the sales did as a result; would the consumers flee from the release of technology, or not care? A good test to see how the public reacts to open-source, I think.
# debian/rules
In the article it mentioned the possibility that SCO's Tarentella (application) division might get bought by Sun. This is interesting considering that one domain mentioned in association with Sun's Open Sourcing of Star Office, openoffice.org, is in fact owned by Caldera!
Well, if you think that once Caldera buys SCO's OpenServer 5 and Unixware 7 and open the sources - then you'll need to think again - many parts of the OS are copyrights by third parties, which means - they cannot release their sources (at least part of them)..
Also, Caldera are not going to buy the entire SCO - the Tarantella part will be spinned of to a whole new company (probably owned by SCO & Caldera)..
SCO biggest advantage is their ISV's and VAR's - they got tons of registered VAR's and ISV's - which Caldera can use to sell their eServer. Remember - the way RedHat works is totally different then Caldera, and Caldera is much more oriented to the suits then RedHat (IMHO of course).
If I'm not mistaken - the latest SCO Unix has many improvments over Linux (failsafe, SMP, and some other parts - I don't remember which ones right now).
Isn't it ironic that 12 months ago SCO called Linux "a toy OS" and now they're going to be sold to a big Linux distributor? :-)
You may also want to look at a story here from the register, which gives more details about the deal
btw: officially - both companies still deny everything..
Hetz (Heunique)
SO what caldera gets here is the ability to sell to more "conservative" companies... you know, the ones that actually believe that they need to be able to sue a company with a REAL OS, like SCO...
... hi bingo
Apparently, IBM had bought out Sequent in recent times and on the day that SCO went up for sale rumours went around that IBM would buy out SCO as well, but surprise, Caldera has beat IBM to it. IBM?s original strategy on the Unix/Linux front was always that it would continue supporting Linux as a choice for low to mid end servers, while supporting the Monterey project to develop a Unix distribution for its high end servers and for clients want a "supported" OS. I guess that Monterey is also IBM's attempt to retain costs that would otherwise by cannibalised by Linux.
Caldera, being a Linux distributor would also follow this same strategy as SCO's current contributions to the Monterey are to valuable at the moment to ignore and left out to rot; and now seeing that one of the aims of Monterey is to provide Linux emulation/binary support(?), as well as a native Linux IA32/PPC code tree, Caldera would surely capitalise on their expertise and experience and would surely be a worthy addition to the alliance in there own right.
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
Does Walt Disney Co. legal know about this?
<O
( \
Will I retire or break 10K?
SCO back in the late 80's early 90's was one of the leaders in x86 Unix versions. Unfortunatly they also had a habit of selling each individual piece that they thought they could. For example, if you wanted TCP/IP, you had to buy it seperatly, if you wanted to compile something on SCO you had to buy the compiler seperatly. If you wanted to just about anything you had to buy the component. Thier searchable Web Help was very nice when I found it around 1994 or 95. But a full SCO system, just the OS would run a couple of thousand dollars. The hardware was cheap, but the OS was expensive. Linux has pretty much taken over everything that SCO was good at, and does better at some things that SCO could.
Let's see... Caldera has provided the following:
o Dynamic channel allocation for PPP in the Linux kernel
o A large chunk of Linux's IPX support
o 100% of Linux's SPX support
o Commercial viability (they brought companies like WordPerfect and Sun to Linux)
o Netscape, which was about to drop Linux as a supported platform (like they dropped FreeBSD), stopped when Caldera offered to take over their Linux development. Do I need to go into what the Linux landscape would look like if Netscape was permitted to drop Linux support? Can we picture a world where muttering "ESR" would be followed by "who??"?
o The first version of RPM was developed using Caldera funds. Hmmm...
o NFS support for Linux (at least some mutations of it) is still maintained by Olaf Kirch, a Caldera engineer
o The LSB project's reference platform lead is Ralf Flaxa, a Caldera engineer
o Nick Petreley, the main evangelist and marketeer for LSB, works for Caldera
o Caldera supports projects like XFree86, KDE, and Willows
o Caldera is responsible for the first Compaq Netelligent NIC drivers
o Caldera has open sourced both the NKFS module used by their NetWare client (they can't open source their NetWare client because THEY DON'T OWN THE TECHNOLOGY; NOVELL DOES) and their Lizard installer. I recall lots of you bitching about Lizard being closed source. It's been open for a while; are you using it? Somehow I doubt it (it's easier to bitch than to back up your words with actions, isn't it?).
I could probably go on, but what good would it do? The average Slashdotter will probably see to it that this remains moderated down to 0 or below so that nobody will see it. It's safer that way. We must make sure that Caldera does not get credit for anything! (Give me a break...)
Meanwhile, consider the following:
- Novell bought Unix from ATT
- Ray Noorda was CEO of Novell
- SCO bought Unix from Novell
- Ray Noorda owns 83.5% of Caldera
Maybe Mr. Noorda just wants to get Unix back at a fire sale price.Well, they probably wouldn't pick that as their new name.
On a somewhat more serious note (I just woke up, there is a limit to how serious I can be in a precoffee state ;-) ), this could be a good thing for the freenix community if Caldera ends up incorporating goodies from SCO in a source-available form. I can also see how this is a good business move for Caldera. They've always been one of the most business-oriented linux distributers (server and desktop), and I can see that having access to SCO's infrastructure would help further that aim.
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I think it's a shame that Caldera's Linux distribution doesn't get more attention from the community. I use it, and in my opinion it is one of the best distributions out there. It is easily 6 months ahead of the competition in terms of install tools, admin tools, etc. It's certainly WAY ahead of RedHat.
Check it out - you might be surprised.
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
Thanks to the impending merger of CNET and Ziff-Davis, in the near future we will no longer subject to read these rumors and rampant speculation at two news sites fighting for banner impressions, but only one, since we'll be able to get our Jesse Berst together with patented banner advertising at a single, unified source of tech news overwhelmed by crap-with-paying-banners.
(disclaimer: yes, I know it's not really a "merger," and I have nothing against these sites other than the aformentioned Jesse Berst and rediculous patents. Besides, they'll probably both stay open and cover the exact same topics in separate articles in order to create more banner views.)
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.