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."

Comments

Long-standing issues ?

[Space cowboy]

I wasn't surprised about the lawsuit against IBM because there were longstanding issues we weren't able to resolve with IBM.

This was interesting - it's the first I've heard of a long-standing disagreement with IBM. The SCO press I've seen so far has presented it as a "We've just discovered this" rather than a "We've been trying for years to rationalise this". I'm surprised they're not taking the latter path, it would look better from a PR perspective. Must be legal reasons, I suppose.

Simon

interesting...

[zeruch]

...in that it offers some mildly engaging history, but not much else. The phrase that bothers me is:

it's so ironic, the turn of events. (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.

I can't tell if thats Ransome indicting Darl or simply distancing himself from the brouhaha.

What Love wisely leaves out...

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Is that he and his management team burned through many tens of millions of dollars worth of venture capital, along with a significant portion of the original Microsoft settlement, and, in the end, had nothing to show for it. The venture capital org behind Caldera (Canopy, remember them?) finally wised up, threw out Love's team, and put it a disaster recovery team.

Caldera/SCO may or may not have any legal basis for when they're doing now, but they've certainly got a better plan that Love's gang of Underpants Gnomes did...

Re:What Love wisely leaves out...

[sjvn]

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

Just how well did Ransom know Darl?

[overbyj]

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?