Adios, Caldera; Hello, SCO Group

An anonymous reader writes: "Caldera International, the company that sprang from Novell and went on to distribute a Linux distribution popular among users before the company's decision to withdraw from the retail desktop market, is no more. Instead, what was once Caldera is now 'the SCO Group.' The change, announced at the company's 'GeoFORUM' conference in Las Vegas Monday, recognizes Caldera's acquisition of SCO Unix, and follows what former employees claimed was a switch in emphasis from Caldera OpenLinux to SCO Unix. At the same time, the company announced a new business plan, called 'SCOx,' and new versions of its Unix and Linux distributions. Details, which combine a multitude of press releases, are on Linux and Main."

Comments

B F Deal

[RebelTycoon]

Nuff said...

In related news... SlashDot.org will be depreciated in favor of Slashdot.COM to further re-enforce the idea that this site will actually generate revenue.

Re:B F Deal

[uk_greg]

Perhaps a more appropriate subject line would be "SCOwhat".

Once again....

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

Who bought Who?

C'mon, everyone knows Ransom Love never gave two hoots about Linux, he just wanted to own UNIX ever since his days at Novell when it got the cold shoulder and the shove out the door. Love's always had serious envy over SGI and SUN. Too bad for him, the days of super high margins on proprietary Unix boxen are gone.

No time for Love...

A dead horse by another name...

[Alomex]

is still a dead horse.

When things dont work, change the product name

[jukal]

when everything is lost, change the names of the whole product line, rebuild your business plan and mutter mantras like "We are firmly dedicated to providing our partners with powerful choices, both with technology and in business. The creation of TeamSCO and SCOx is a tangible example of that commitment". Also, as last hope, announce availibility of some alpha/beta software.

It has been long since I have seen as confusing messaging, this seems almost like a joke. It does not make any sense at all.

SCOx seems appropriate

[frovingslosh]

The name change seems appropriate, am I going to be the first to note how it will be pronounced?

Re:SCOx seems appropriate

[red_dragon]

... am I going to be the first to note how it will be pronounced?

Maybe not, but here are my suggestions:

• Ess-Cee-Oh-Ecks
• Skoh-Ecks
• Santa Cruz Ox
• S-Cocks

Take your pick.

Re:VA Software

[jukal]

why don't you go straight to FIASCO :)

Really, really dumb move...

[Ami Ganguli]

SCO sells its Unix line to Caldera because they know that Linux is killing Unix on Intel. Then Caldera, finding it can't compete in the Linux market, decides to emphasize Unix on Intel? What's the point of giving up one failing business model for another?

Caldera needs to find itself a nice niche. Given it's links to Novell, a Linux distro with tightly integrated NDS would make a great product. Climbing into the sinking SCO ship is a stupid idea.

Re:Really, really dumb move...

[Ami Ganguli]

In fact I've never heard that, and I've administered Solaris, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, SCO OpenServer, and UnixWare. OpenServer was absolutely the worst Unix I've ever had the misfortune to use. UnixWare was tolerable, but still not up to the standards set by the others. Linux doesn't have all the high-end features, but it's just nicer to use.

I think there was a window where SCO could have produced their own Linux distro and kept their user base, but they missed their chance. Legacy SCO will be around for a while, but new projects are going to Linux - mostly RedHat.

Re:Really, really dumb move...

[Wdomburg]

>However, I disagree with you and all others (seems
>to be 90% of posters here) who claim that SCO is
>failing in the market. First of all, everybody
>who has worked with UnixWare described it as one
>of the best Unix on any platform.

I've got SCO ACE certification in Openserver and Unixware, SCO Master ACE certification in Non-Stop Clusters and Openserver, and supported as far back as SCO Unix 3.2v4.0 and Unixware 1.1 (as a legacy product after it was purchased by SCO).

Openserver was a nightmare to work with. First off, just BUYING it was a task. Need a licence for the operating system, tcp/ip support, multiple processor support, disk mirroring, and whatever user count you need. If it was an upgrade, you had to know what version you were coming from, how many users you had licensed, what units they were licenced in, etc, etc.

Then you get to buying the hardware to install it on, and half the supported hardware is discontinued. Whoops.

Finally get a system to put it on, and you're greeting with a picky installed worse than what Redhat had on version 3.0.3, which you complete only to have to start the arduous task of installing all the patches and hardware supplements - RS505, OSS471, OSS491, OSS600, etc. And God help you if you accidently installed one out of order, because then its time to roll back, reapply, and pray it goes smoothly so you don't have to reinstall.

After installing nothing but the base operating system and the vendor supplied patches, its time to run a verify on the operating system, because oft times there'd already be issues with permissions and symlinks.

Then maybe you'd want to do a backup to your shiny new DAT drive. Whoops, have to relink the kernel for that. And as you manually type in the location of your tape drive, you accidently put in the wrong bus. When you notice your error you try to delete the device and add it correctly, but it won't go away. Turns out you have to manually edit six different files scattered across the filesystem, including the kernel headers.

Mind you, Unixware was better... at least Unixware 7 was. However the initial releases were buggy as hell, and were a bizarre mixture of SysV, Netwarisms, and Openserverisms.

I think their best bet for carving a niche for themselves was the Non-stop Cluster product. Platform aside, it was a pretty damn slick single system image cluster. I got to play with some of the first ones in existence, and actually built out four of them (two on my own, one while I was assisting a SCO instructor doing an on-site training, and one at an advance training out in Santa Cruz)). Very cool stuff, though it suffered from the expected flakiness of a new product; doubly so since it was built on a brand new operating system.

Unfortunately, it seems that they never managed to capture any marketshare, and from what I can see on the website, it looks like they only offer a high availability solution now.

So what do these products have to offer the market now aside from legacy support, and a few niche markets which are slow to change?

Matt

Re:What's next,

[Tackhead]

> they're going to re-brand their distro as 'XENIX' and their CEO will be sued for sexual harrassment?

1) Get sued for sexual harassment.
2) Cut off internet access to all employees.
3) Pay a fortune for the name "UNIX"
4) Because Linux is "a religion" [...] that "didn't break any new ground" written by "punk young kids"
5) Shuts down all your development teams.
6) Change your mind on Linux 5 years too late and call it Caldera?
7) Umm, rename it to SCO again?
8) ????

I dunno what 9) is, but it sure as hell ain't gonna be "Profit".

This is hilarious

[drinkypoo]

I used to run SCO Xenix on my 286-6 with 1mb of ram. What a great OS, a zillion times faster than DOS, and with preemptive multitasking.

SCO Unix, on the other hand, is a dog. I mean, woof woof woofity woof woof. It's slow, it's uncompatible (try building some perfectly POSIX C code of any size on it) and it's not free/open. Linux has been working on slaughtering it for some time now, and I really thought it had succeeded.

Now caldera is trying to make a business out of SCO Unix? It'll NEVER. HAPPEN. Where the hell do they keep getting money for this crap?

SCO UNIXen

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Just a reminder, Caldera has three UNIX(like) OSes.

1) OpenServer, the "old" SCO unix. This is a dog, and is not getting any real updates. Basically just fixes, SCO is milking this cash cow as long as it can, but it's already pretty dry. Anyone who's used it will remember the symbolic link hell it was.

2) OpenUNIX 8, nee UnixWare 7. This is where the real development is going to. This is SVR5 UNIX. Why? because thats what SCO says SVR5 UNIX is. It's it's party, and it can call it what it wants. SCO owns the UNIX trademark. OpenUNIX has a lot of GNU userland tools and pretty strong Linux compatibility in the kernel. Said to run Linux binaries a bit fqaster than Linux, mostly because of a better VM.

3) Caldera Linux. Don't know much about this except to say it exists. Well I had a login once, it was Linux, really.

A lot of folks seem to be comfusing 1 and 2 above. They're different beasts.

Caldera did spring from Novell, sorta

[alienmole]

Caldera sprang from Novell in the sense that it was co-founded by Ray Noorda, the founder and ex-CEO of Novell.

Caldera purchased the rights to DR-DOS from Novell in 1996.

Caldera has not acquired Novell. Novell is an independently traded public company listed on NASDAQ.