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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.
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
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.
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.