[ale] non-technical Linux question

Mon Feb 17 16:27:24 EST 2014

IIRC, at some point prior to the flurry of lawsuits and the licensing
"deal" that SCO was offering, Caldera bought SCO and changed their name
from Caldera to SCO. It was actually the Caldera crowd that "sank the ship"
with all their unsuccessful lawsuits, trying to profit from extortion
rather than product sales.

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Lightner, Jeff <JLightner at water.com> wrote:

> There's some debate about whether Novell "sold" or "licensed" and therein
> was a major focus of the litigation that ultimately resulted in SCO's
> demise.   Essentially SCO was claiming it "owned" "UNIX" and that everyone
> else had "licensed" "UNIX" from AT&T who in turn sold it to Novell.  There
> is no doubt there was a point at which Novell essentially contracted with
> SCO to deal with the UnixWare offerings as well as SCO's own UNIX
> offerings.  The question was did Novell "sell" it or "license it".   SCO
> claimed that IBM who was embracing Linux in a big way had improperly
> included proprietary UNIX code (from AIX or OS/390 licensing) in OpenSource
> Linux so that meant SCO owned Linux.
>
> You could check out Groklaw (or copies of stuff from there since it
> stopped posting for separate reasons) for the whole sordid story.   Not
> being a lawyer and doing this from memory my (possibly faulty) recollection
> of it all summarized was:
> 1)  The courts decided that Novell never "sold" UNIX - it licensed it to
> SCO.
> 2)  Not only did SCO not have rights to UNIX as used by anyone else it
> actually owed unpaid license fees to Novell for what it had been doing with
> UNIX itself.
> 3)  Not only did they NOT find proprietary UNIX code in Linux, the code
> that SCO challenged was actually Linux code improperly used in their UNIX
> which meant SCO was in violation of the GPL.
>
> In the middle of all that SCO was offering a "license" to distro makers
> that would exonerate them of any fallout if the courts did decide they
> owned Linux but as I recall only Suse (a once-related company) was ever
> dumb enough to sign a contract for that.
>
> The last I'd heard the "board" (a bunch of lawyers) of SCO fired the CEO
> who'd started all the litigation.  It seems it had long since gone bankrupt
> and its only "business" appeared to be the lawsuits.  That CEO either did
> or said he would start an action against that "board" after his firing to
> protect the interest of the shareholders (whose stock was now worthless
> anyway so one wonders what he would be protecting).
>
> It was really a sad state of affairs.  In its day SCO UNIX was a good
> product and unlike most other UNIX variants was designed to run on any
> intel platform rather than proprietary hardware.
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Paul
> Cartwright
> Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 3:45 PM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] non-technical Linux question
>
> On 02/17/2014 08:44 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> > SCO "Linux"?   I've never heard of that one.  I did work on SCO Xenix
> and SCO UNIX back in the early 90s.
> >
> > I had been working with various UNIX systems starting in the mid 80s
> (I'd been doing DOS before that and did Novell Netware) but they were all
> adjuncts to my full time job in accounting (early on computers were the
> responsibility of accounting departments mainly because they were first
> adopters of PCs for spreadsheets).   In 91 I got my first full time IT job
> doing various UNIX (anyone here ever heard of Astrix from NEC [NOT the PBX
> FOSS of today]?) flavors.    About 95-96 I changed jobs and although the
> main job was HP-UX many of us got Caldera Linux desktops.   That was pretty
> cool as it contained WABI from Sun so could run the Windows 3.1.1 crud the
> corporation used, rather seamlessly.   WINE was not a good alternative in
> those days.   Most of what I've done since then has been with various
> RedHat/CentOS/Fedora versions though I have also played with Debian on
> PA-RISC just to see it work.   I've also worked with other FOSS stuff like
> FreeBSD.
> >
> > HP-UX
> > SunOS/Solaris
> > Dynix
> > AT&T UNIX
> > NCR UNIX
> > SCO Xenix
> > SCO UNIX (and later Open Desktop - originally TCP/IP and X-Windows
> > were separate add-ons that most installs didn't bother to buy) Novell
> > UnixWare
> Novell also sold Unixware to SCO:
> http://www.xinuos.com/index.php/products/virtualization/unixware7plus
>
> I worked on AT&T Unix and we also had Unixware platforms for our IVR
> group..
>
> --
> Paul Cartwright
> Registered Linux User #367800 and new counter #561587
>
>
>
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