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Caldera Acquires Big Chunk Of SCO
It came across the wire today that Caldera Systems is buying a big chunk of SCO. Caldera is buying SCO's Server Software and Professional Service Divisions from SCO, giving SCO 28% of the company. As well, one of Caldera's major investors is loaning $18 million to SCO, who will be keeping their Tarantella Divison - the press release has the other statistics in mind-numbing detail. The company is being renamed from Caldera Systems to Caldera, Inc. and Ransom Love [?] (who I think should win coolest CEO name) will remain as CEO.
As a top-flight professional consultant with many years experiance in the enterprise IT community I've worked with SCO in the past year or so, helping them with their plans for moving their primary focus from UnixWare to Linux in order to capitalise on the increasingly trendy Open Source movement as epitomised by such "gurus" as Eric Raymond (the suit's friend!) and Richard Stallman (the ideologue).
Anyway, to cut a long story short from all of the indications that I got from working with some of their middle managers they as a company are commited to refocusing their brand to a more open source-friendly image. This takeover makes sense given the new product strategy embraced by SCO, and will provide increased mindshare and a better product for everybody. So everybody wins!
Some of the more tech-savvy of my agency's clients have been asking about SCO's plans already since SCO is a trusted presence in the enterprise UNIX world, and many of the more sensible CTOs are still concerned about the validity of the business model that most Linux companies are using at the moment. They don't want to be caught with their pants down when RedHat et al. go down the plug, but they know they can trust a name like SCO, which is the most important thing.
So, this looks like it could be a winner for everyone, and I made a big fat fee out of it :)
Means that they bought UNIXWARE and OpenServer.
OpenServer is a piece of crap but UNIXWARE is pretty cool.
For those who don't know UNIXWARE is the "last" and "latest" of the "ereal" unix kernels from AT&T.
This could be very good for Linux if Caldera opens it up.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
SCO is an offshoot of Microsoft. At one time MS owned a large stake in the company. Remember MS-Xenix? Well it evolved into SCO Unix and is now known as OpenServer. Unixware is SYS-V v4 which SCO bought from Novell who themselves bought it from USL, a company spun off by AT&T when it combined the features sets of Sys-V and BSD to create Sys-V v4. From what I understand, companies which market derivatives of Sys-V, such as Sun with solaris, pay SCO licensing fees because SCO owns the code that the other versions are derived from. So that makes me wonder, does Caldera now own this code? Wouldn't that be ironic? A linux company having the IP rights to Unix. But from the press release it seems that this probably isn't the case. "SCO will retain its Tarantella Division, and the SCO OpenServer revenue stream and intellectual properties." But what about Unixware? Where does that come into play? Did it go to the tarantella division? I know that IBM is working with SCO on monterey, which I'd assume is derived from unixware. So it probably didn't change hands either. So what Caldera got was the customers which SCO didn't want anymore. SCO realizes that its lost the server market that OpenServer once competed in to linux. SCO is cutting its losses so that it can concentrate on its Tarantella middleware, which has already been partially ported to linux. So instead of continuing to try to compete with linux, SCO decided to cash in on linux the best way it could, selling a middleware package FOR linux. They could have created their own distribution, but they've been in the game too long to be that foolish. The number of linux distributions will shrink in the coming years. The industry will likely consolidate around a dominant distribution, with many smaller niche distributions filling in the gaps. SCO knows that it is too late in the game at this point to throw its chips in as well. The future money to be made in the linux game will not come from distributions, but from the commercial software which runs on top of them. Companies which sell high quality software, for which there is no viable free alternative, are the ones which will reap the greatest financial benefit from linux's popularity. If I had any money I'd invent in SCO right now because they clearly understand this. Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I noticed over at the IEEE Computer Fair website that Ransom Love is giving a keynote address. I bet he'll also be able to go into some detail about their plans for SCO.
In with the new.
You know what is really funny about this ? Caldera will now be the 1st publicly traded Linux company with seriously large revenue on display. Who knows, they may even make some hefty profits.
SCO keeps Tarantella which gives them an immense amount of flexibility. With only a cross platform midleware type product in it's portfolio, SCO can now pick and choose partners at will. More likely however, it will try to get acquired by somebody else. Dose IBM want them ?
SCO Unixware is nice and all. If I was Caldera, I would kill it slowly. This means putting most of the development staff responsible onto more profitable future products and sending maybe 1/2 of them home ( Veteran programers don't stay unemployed ). The rest will be kept to do only bug fixing for the next 5 years or so and to move any useful technologies over to Linux.
For the record, Open Sourcing the entire OS is impossible since SCO doesn't own all it's code and never did. Even MS probably still has stuff in there. It is also a bad idea since something this huge will probably cause more trouble then anything.
The real cash cow for Caldera will be professional services. Caldera has 5 OSs to support now ( by my count ). Expand this Professional Services to support everyone else's software too and suddenly Caldera has leapfrogged into what RedHat and Linuxcare claim they want to be when they grow up.
Som how this reminds me of AOL buying Time Warner or EBay buying that old Auction house.
Out with the old. In with the new. Indead.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I think that's a Utah Mormon thing. They have a long-standing tradition of giving their children really unique names, which perhaps arose as a reaction to the limited range of family names in the original Mormon colony.
Nah, SCO was never a Microsoft subsidary. Microsoft did their own Unix, Xenix, and then when they got Quick & Dirty Operating System, soon to become PC-DOS and then MS-DOS for cheap, they got out of the Unix biz and sold Xenix to SCO. For a brief while they jointly marketed and supported Xenix, that was it.
6 06631,00.html
For more on Microsoft, the Unix company, and the early days of SCO and Unix on Intel, see my column:
http://www.zdnet.com/sp/stories/column/0,4712,2
Steven
I haven't used it since version 1.2 untill last week when I found EDESKTOP 2.4 at BestBuy for $29.99 bundled with some commercial apps. At the same time I was getting ready to build a new workstation for the office, so what the heck I bought it. I've used slack and redhat for years, but I was really impressed with calderas 2.4 release. The install was killer for the average joe whois is from the windows world. Actually in terms of ease of use I think it's installer is better than win9x. It also came with partition magic and boot magic which for the newbie would be a good thing. During the install you get to play pacman while it's copying files too. :)
/opt for somereason. But it was all easy to work around. Matter of fact I'm typing a document in the supplied applixware that it came with, (it comes with star office too).
.... It's IMHO by far the best one yet. No more tweaking my conf files. Just answer the questions like normal, and it works. I did ned to use xvidtune to get it exactly perfect, but no big deal. Redhat likes to make my screen at a low resoltion with a huge scrolling background, which I always hate having to waste my time fixing by hand.
:)(the install has a selection for this) And it doesn't have pine!!! Granted I don't use pine for my mail anyway, but for editing I use either pico or joe depending on my mood. no pico or joe. Had to go grab joe and pine off of freshmeat.
I've been running it on this machine for about a week now, and it's doing well. I've had a few problems with some apps looking for something that is located in the wrong place. Caldera likes to stick alot of things in
One last note is the xwindows configurator, lizardx
Also for the newbies, it does have a web based configuration tool. I played with it, and it is alot better than linuxconf. I still perfer the oldschool methods though, probably because I've been doing it for years and want the power and flexibility, which of course is still do able.
The only thing I didn't like about it. I literally installed every package it had including everything I'll never use
I hope they keep up the great work on thier distro, it's probably the one that will actually take Linux to the consumer desktop market as an easy useable product for anyone to use. Oh yeah it had acrobat reader, flash4 and realplayer5 preconfigured out of the box and they were even runing out of netscape without doing anything.
-Helmet
BSD/OS and FreeBSD will remain separate products. They will share some code, however.
-bugg
errr... I'm not trolling!
:-(
OK, it wasn't good humour, but it certainly wasn't a troll. Also, it wasn't moderated up to 2, it was posted at 2 because I've been posting for years and happen to have high enough karma.
Of course, I should have chosen to post without the +1 advantage as this wasn't a serious comment - but I forgot.
Sheez the trolls have gotten everyone jumpy
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
We are Linux, your code WILL be incorporated.
When I were your age, all round here were fields...
Does anyone else think they need to drop the "blue mickey mouse ear on a red globe" logo?
Caldera is the Linux distributer whose policy centers on targeting the Value Added Reseller channel. This is exactly the market that SCO has the best ties in. So this gets rid of the considerable stigma that was associated with SCO's repeated attempts to knife Linux in the back, while taking advantage of that channel.
Therefore this deal is a very natural fit.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
... police are investigating a man with the pseudoname "Ransom Love" who was reputed to have bought a huge lump of hash earlier today.
Upon further investigation, the hash proved to be a dried cow flop. Ransom Love declined to comment.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
1. ACL-based, granular security with roles and auditing. For a secure system, the all-powerful root HAS to go.
2. An SMP implementation that scales.
3. Logical volume management. Win2k (and NetWare, and VMS, and Solaris, and UnixWare, and SCO Unix, etc...) kicks our ass here, as much as it pains me to admit it.
4. VxFS. (OK, so this is licensed from Veritas and can't be opened up, but I can dream.)
Most of these aren't fun or cool to implement, but serious production environments really need them, and commercial Unixes, NetWare, VMS and now Win2K all offer these features.
I have always considered Caldera and SCO to be a perfect match, not on technical but philosophical grounds. Opinions expressed by the CEOs of BOTH companies have revealed a deep-seated resentment toward GNU/Linux and the GPL.
Caldera's Ransom Love made that painfully clear in his whining speech at Comdex, where he called the GPL "restrictive" for not allowing people to violate it (i.e., not allowing Caldera to violate it) and that such strict control made it "proprietary":
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2
And we all know too well how SCO and its CEO have made Linux part of its business with one hand while publicly stabbing Linux and its supporters in the back with the other hand:
http://www.xos.nl/misc/sco.html
I wish the two vampires a wonderful and bloody honeymoon.
And be careful when you say that this is a "victory for Linux, because Caldera is a Linux company". Caldera was competing with Micro$oft on M$'s own turf (remember DRDOS) before they found the goldmine in Linux.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
HAL9000
It's important to note that despite what has been written in some of the press, SCO owns the rights to some of the original Unix code, but doesn not own the rights to the trademark.
If you want a Unix sourcecode license, SCO sold them.
If you want to use the Unix name, you have to talk to The Open Group.
Still, it would be nice if they would GPL portions of the Unix sourcecode and get them integrated into Linux so that the press would stop calling Linux a Unix-LIKE OS.
Not mentioned in the story is the news that Ransom's brother, Buddy, will be responsible for media relations and EEOC-enforcement for the new SCO acquisitions.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I sort of agree with you...
for (1), I think that it won't so much be Caldera soliciting their customers to move to Linux, it will just try to capture all the customers who have already decided to go to linux and are just beginning to implement it.
For (2), I agree with the earlier poster who stated that SCO Unix can never be opened completely because SCO doesn't even own all of it. Likely they will open parts of it, and port parts of it to Linux.
My expectation is that they will create a so-called "high-end" Linux distribution, with some SCO software (mostly userland) in it, specifically targeted to people migrating from SCO Unix.
Not a distribution for you and me, but very attractive for some people.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
If you read Slashdot or other news sources, you might have noticed that BSDI and Walnut Creek (a major supporter of FreeBSD) are merging. What this means is that BSDI and FreeBSD themselves are going to eventually merge as the BSD/OS (BSDI's product) is gradually Open-Sourced. While this "daemon mating" is another example of commercial/open source merging, I don't see it happening to any large degree.
:)
(Having said this, there will probably be a "HP/UX - OpenBSD merger" story posted next
-- Floyd
-- Floyd
It's merely speculation on my part, but I would expect Caldera to do a couple of things.
1. I think its likely that the first thing Caldera is going to do is get the SCO customer database merged with their own. I would imagine, that those customers are probably going to start getting offers/solicitations to move to Linuz.
2. I am also pretty confident that SCO Unix will be opened up, if just to keep it alive long enough to pick it clean and incorporate whatever may be appropriate into Linux.
3. Try to win over the various SCO VAR's as well as some of the application vendors to Linux.
I would be very surprised if Caldera didn't do any of those three.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
The Canopy Group is Ray Noorda's private venture capital company that he started after leaving Novell. He funds just about anything that'll take a shot at Microsoft, like Willows Software, Caldera, and Palm cloner TRG. He also has money in Troll Tech, too.
Ray Noorda is really the perfect sugar daddy for what's left of SCO. He's ridiculously rich (not Gates level, but he has enough to fund a lot of startups) and he hates Microsoft. And he already owned Unix once - he's the one who had Novell buy Unix System Labs back in the early part of the '90s. I met him some years back (and I'm friends with some people whe are and have been connected with him), and, based mostly on the word of the people I know, I consider him to be one of the few Good Guys in the business.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
As long as I can understand, SCO retains the "intellectual properties", which should mean that Caldera won't become owner of "UNIX" trademark, right? And also, they write "OpenServer" everywhere, but UnixWare is not named, and unixware ---> Monterey. OpenServer is an almost discontinued product, keept alive just for its wide accounting software base.
I am understanding that Caldera is buying openserver and not unixware, and without any right about the Unix name. They buy unix without buying it... strange.
I had a brain cramp and mentioned the wrong TRG. Noorda's TRG _isn't_ the Palm cloner one, it's the one that works on clustering software (the former Wolf Mountain guys from Novell). I haven't had my coffee yet, sorry.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I have always had several distributions installed at once, but the only two which have consistenly had shares of my hard drive(s) since I first tried them are Slackware and Caldera OpenLinux. Why?
It is done well. Quality counts, and some distributions over the years have not had it.
So I hope that Caldera sticks to tradition and doesn't end up looking more like SCO, which is a pile of buggy, nearly unusable swill that nobody should buy when *BSD can be downloaded and Solaris is still available.
Caldera is looking for some of SCO's customers here, that's all (at least, I hope that's all). It doens't seem like they really got much software IP, so hopefully we're not looking at some bastardized "SCOpenLinux" or something... That might finally pull OpenLinux/eDesktop off of my hard drive and I'd be left with Slackware, which is where I started my Linux adventure all those years ago... *sniff*
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I don't know how much business Caldera is getting, but I know for an absolute fact taht Redhat is not getting all the business.
SuSE is still going gangbusters, Mandrake keeps making Redhat look behind them, Corel is due out with v2 real soon, Slack just came out with v7.1, ad infinitum. On the non-Linux side, the FreeBSD camp is starting to get some serious attention.
This is not the Windows world. People won't run a particular distribution just because everyone else is. Once you've had a taste of free choice, you won't go back. Most of us don't give a rip what distro our neighbor is using.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I can see it now! Caldera OpenXenix! "The closest thing you'll ever get to Microsoft Linux!" Features KDE running on top of SCO (formerly Micros~1) Xenix! Regular crashes! You'll think you're running Win95, except it'll look like Unix! Yeah!
:)
My journal has hot
SCO will retain its Tarantella Division, and the SCO OpenServer revenue stream and intellectual properties
So I would assume that SCO is keeping the source for OpenServer. It doesn't mention UnixWare anywhere but this statement may apply to that as well.