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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.
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.
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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
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
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
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
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."
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 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.