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Caldera/SCO Co-Founder Ransom Love Speaks
securitas writes "CNet has published an interview with Caldera (now SCO Group) co-founder Ransom Love, in which he talks about the Novell acquisition of SuSE, Novell's Linux history, the early history of Caldera, the SCO-IBM lawsuit, his new role at Progeny and open standards. It's a good read that covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space."
Owned linux ?, Last time I checked nobody owned , owns or never will own linux, not even linus. Isn't that open source is all about ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
The article mentions that Love knew Darl from Novell and brought him on board at Caldera/SCO. Does anybody know what Darl did at Novell? I just wonder what was going through Ransom's head when he decided to hire Darl. Was Darl this superstar executive at Novell or was he the one that was always telling Novell "hey, our IP is being infringed somewhere, let's get on the suing bandwagon"?
I am just wondering what the legacy of Darl was at Novell that made him so suited to be CEO of some company that has morphed into one of the most hated entities in the IT world?
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
In light of this quote, I'm inclined to agree with you: (Caldera began discussing) what we can do through UnitedLinux to indemnify people who had used both Unix and Linux. Apparently, Darl took that in a little different direction than we intended. Apparently, Ransom also thinks that there is some sort of legal reconciliation necessary for people using Linux and UNIX.
No, as someone who's followed the history of both SCO and Caldera, before and after their merger, I'd say Caldera's troubles had a lot more to do with IBM leaving them in the lurch with Project Monterey; the slow growth of all dedicated Linux businesses--remember even Red Hat only recently turned a profit; and the reasons that Love gives in the interview.
Had Love stayed on, I think Caldera/SCO was well on its way to righting itself. And, by now, its stock price would be about what it is today.
Shocking? Not really. Something almost everyone forgets, today's SCO stock price should be divided by four when comparing it to Caldera's bad days. Just before Love left, in May 2002 Caldera had a four to one reverse stock split. Thus, today's SCO price of $13.50 is equal to a Aug. 2001 (Caldera acquires SCO) to May 2002 (4/1 split) price of $3.38. For all the stock excitement SCO has generated, by 'long' measurement, McBride's team still hasn't done that much for the stock. That may explain why they're still so focused on winning at any cost.
But had Love stayed, this would have been ironic, I'm quite sure Caldera/SCO, not SuSE, would now be being acquired by Novell.
Steven
No. Caldera was always the Linux company that didn't "get it" the most. They wanted to own Linux. Love says it in this article that he thought Novell could own Linux. He was prescient is seeing a bright future for Linux and he thought he could chain up that star and then hitch his wagon to it. He helped create this monster.
I think this is in reference to the System V/Linux compatibility library Caldera had developed, which was based on System V code and allowed System V software to run on Linux. (Last I checked, SCO was still marketing this product.) They wanted to make it so that the only way to run System V software on Linux was to license this library. ("Sure, you can drop SCO for Linux while preserving your software base, but it will cost you...")
Even this is controversial since it relies on the claim that the independent re-implementations of the System V ABI (which both Linux and BSD had) were illegal. But McBride and Company thought they could take this a whole lot farther, as we've seen...
Or NeXT. At least they've gotten redemption for some of their better technologies in Mac OS X and Cocoa.