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The SCO Group, Inc. (TSG, informally SCO; ) is a software company formerly called Caldera Systems and Caldera International. After acquiring the Santa Cruz Operation's Server Software and Services divisions, as well as UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, the company changed its focus to UNIX. Later on Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group to reflect that change in focus. It was part of the Canopy Group, but became independent after the settlement of a lawsuit between the Noorda family and a chairman of the group, Ralph Yarro, also former CEO of the Canopy Group.
History Caldera Systems, based in Utah, was founded in 1994 by Ransom Love, and received start-up funding from Ray Noorda. Its main product was Caldera Network Desktop, a Linux distribution mainly targeted at business customers and containing some proprietary additions. Caldera later purchased The Linux Support Team Software GmbH and its LST Linux distribution. LST was made the basis of their following product Caldera OpenLinux. In 2000, after a long legal battle, Microsoft reached an undisclosed settlement with Caldera (that Microsoft stated included a substantial payment to Caldera). This lawsuit related to Caldera's claims of monopolization, illegal tying, exclusive dealing, and tortious interference by Microsoft. All claims stemmed from rights inherited by Caldera's purchase of DR-DOS from Novell, for $400,000, in 1996. Later in 2000, Caldera acquired several UNIX properties from The Santa Cruz Operation, including OpenServer and UnixWare, proprietary operating systems for PCs that would be expected to compete directly with Linux. In 2002, Caldera joined with SuSE Linux, Turbolinux and Conectiva to form United Linux in an attempt to standardize Linux distributions. Later that year, CEO Ransom Love left the company and was replaced by Darl McBride. That year, Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group. In 2003, SCO began to claim that Linux contained large amounts of its intellectual property. SCO filed suit against IBM and demanded that Linux end-users pay license fees. A new division called SCOsource was created to licence the company's intellectual property. These claims provoked outrage among Linux users, who denied that Linux had copied anything belonging to SCO, and a lawsuit against SCO by Linux distributor RedHat. Novell, from whom SCO claimed to have acquired its Unix IP, announced that it had not sold the copyrights to SCO and that it retained them. In response, SCO sued Novell for slander of title. Subsequently, the SCO Group sued two former customers (Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler). SCO claims Autozone violated SCO's copyrights by using Linux. SCO did not go this far with Daimler-Chrysler. Instead, SCO claimed that Daimler-Chrysler breached a section of a UNIX licensing contract that required Daimler-Chrysler to respond to requests for certification by SCO. Daimler-Chrysler, when allegedly faced with such a request, did not respond. However, SCO also speculated that Daimler-Chrysler broke the licensing agreement when they moved to the Linux operating system and that this is the reason why they refused to certify. SCO tried to make these lawsuits appear an action for being Linux users * when they were in fact related to contracts between the companies. SCO's suit against Daimler-Chrysler was dismissed in 2004. After announcing its legal claims against various Linux users and vendors (see The Linux Wars below), the company suspended sales and development of its Linux related products. Attention was shifted to the Unixware and OpenServer UNIX products previously acquired from the Santa Cruz Operation. Products The Linux Wars Main article: SCO-Linux controversies The SCO Group is currently involved in a dispute with various Linux vendors and users. In this campaign SCO asserts that Linux violates some of SCO's intellectual property. Although many are skeptical about their claims, SCO initiated a series of lawsuits and claims that, if upheld by the courts, may impact the future of both Linux and Unix. While making numerous public assertions that Linux infringes upon their copyrights, the lawsuits themselves concern contractual issues which are tangential to the issue of whether or not Linux infringes any copyrights. Further complicating the issue is the legitimacy of SCO claims concerning the ownership of SVR4 Unix copyrights. The success or failure of the claims will also have a profound effect on the financial future of The SCO Group, itself. SCO has, to date, made little headway in this dispute. In particular, in February 2005, Judge Kimball, the Judge in the SCO v. IBM case has stated: List of recent SCO lawsuits There was also a related lawsuit in which the group was involved known as the Yarro case. Timeline On June 28, 2002 Darl McBride became the CEO of SCO; soon thereafter the company pursued litigation against IBM and Linux. McBride accused Linux of containing "line-by-line" copies of SCO's proprietary source code in apparent contradiction to the subsequent Davidson email. * On February 17, 2005 the SCO Group issued a press release that stated their stock may soon be delisted from NASDAQ for failing to issue an annual 10-K report in a timely manner as required by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulations. * In late April of 2005, after complying with the filing requirements, the NASDAQ switched trading of the SCO Group from "SCOXE" back to their original "SCOX" stock symbol. On July 1, 2005, federal judge Dale A. Kimball denied The SCO Group's motion to amend their claim against IBM yet another time (a 3rd amended complaint) and include new claims regarding Monterey on the PowerPC architecture. In the same decision, the 5-week jury trial date was set for February 2007 * On July 14, 2005, Groklaw obtained * an email * from Michael Davidson to SCO Group senior VP Reginald Broughton sent on August 13, 2002. In it, Davidson describes the The Santa Cruz Operation's own investigation into whether or not Linux contained proprietary UNIX source code. "At the end, we had found absolutely Data Charts | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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