SEC Investigating SCO?

Udo Schmitz writes "As Groklaw reports, the SCO Group stated in a SEC filing from yesterday: 'In addition, regulators or others in the Linux market and some foreign regulators have initiated or in the future may initiate legal actions against us, all of which may negatively impact our operations and future operating performance.' Does this mean the SEC finally started to pull some stops? SCOs and Canopys financial dealings (Vultus acquisition anyone?) long ago lead to speculations in the Linux community about the legality of their business practices, or the whole lawsuit just being a stock scam."

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[Udo Schmitz]

There is another link I should've added to the submission: This site assembles some very interesting information from the Yahoo SCOX Financial Board.

Re:I hear quite abit about SCO

[pg110404]

Santa Clara Operations.

I believe that's Santa Cruz Operations.

Re:I hear quite abit about SCO

[snorklewacker]

Set anal probes to stun:

This is the second time I heard them called "Santa Clara Operations". It's "The Santa Cruz Operation". They were a joint venture with Microsoft to write a port of Unix System V to the 8086 and 8088. They called this port Xenix. Microsoft was supposed to pay SCO licensing for Xenix, but since they never used it, they figured they didn't have to pay SCO. SCO demanded rights to Xenix back, and got it.

For a while, SCO Unix sort of held its own on cost. The damn thing didn't even come with TCP/IP (you had to buy it from Excelan or another vendor) but once you got it up, you could run backoffice apps like order printing on the cheap, and it was reliable enough as long as you had a competent admin. They later grew into a bloated corporate entity with an increasingly shoddy product, but they had a moment in the sun. Later, the same company went on to produce products like Reflection (a rather good terminal emulator package, later sold off to WRQ and becoming Reflection X), and Tarantella, which was like VNC well before VNC. Tarantella was the most successful SCO product ever, and eventually SCO changed its name to match the product.

Tarantella sold off the name SCO to Caldera, a company whose history I know less of, except that they appear to be the working retirement package for Novell executives. Since Novell was going nowhere with their shiny new trophy -- the Unix name -- they sold it off to Caldera. Additionally, they bought the SCO name from Tarantella, who appeared more than happy to be rid of it. They started a not-terribly-well-received commercial Linux distribution, but also poured quite a lot of resources into free software development including KDE and various network utilities.

All was pretty happy for a while until a major shareholder, The Canopy Group then led by Ralph Yarro III, decided that this Linux thing wasn't really all that hot after all, and decided to kick Ransom Love out and replace him with Darl McBride -- another former Novell exec. McBride apparently agreed with Yarro that the demise of Project Monterey, a joint venture with IBM that scuttled SCO's prospects (that is, Caldera SCO, not Tarantella SCO) when it went away, meant that IBM had to pay, and pay hard, and that since they went with Linux, Linux had to pay too.

The rest you can read on Groklaw. I have to get back to work :) Just remember, the company bearing the name SCO is Caldera, a former puppet of the Canopy group, now running on McBride's and Yarro's egos alone. The original SCO is now soon to be a division of Sun, though it's not as if anyone even working there is from "the old SCO" either.

Re:I hear quite abit about SCO

[swv3752]

The Original SCO was known as The Santa Cruz Operation. They created the first x86 Unix called Xenix. In 1995 they obtain some sort of licensing from Novell. In 1998, they announced Project Monterey with IBM. They are now know as Tarantella but most of the business was sold to Cadera.

The SCO Group started as Cadera Systems and was split off from Novell in 1994. They were a Linux Distributor and was involved in the devolopement of the Red Hat Package Manager. In 2001 they acquire most of SCO includig rights to use the name. In 2002, Ransom Love leaves as CEO and Daryl McBride is named the new CEO. Later the name is changed from Caldera to the SCO Group, SCO for short. 2003 The IBM lawsuit is launched. SCO produces ever more ridiculous PR pieces. Eventually the mainstream press catches on that SCO is full of it (and I don't mean Information Technology).

Most of this available as a timeline from SCO