Comment Deja vu:HP first ported Linux to Itanium &SCO (Score 2) 216
In February 1998, well before even the first prototype IA-64 chips were available, a skunkworks team at HP, with some assistance from Intel, began the work toward porting Linux to IA-64. By October 1998,around the same time that IBM, Old SCO and Sequent had finished negotiations, HP had completed the build toolchain. By January 1999, the Linux kernel was booting on an IA-64 processor simulator, months before the actual Itanium processor was available. In March 1999, at Intel, Linux was booting on the actual Intel Itanium processor.
The SCO Group (then Caldera) which had purchased the rights to sell copies of the old Unix from Novell, sued IBM because the freely available Linux competed the SCO Groups old Unix offering.
So Oracle has become the next SCO Group, quick somebody tell PJ!