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Caldera

Caldera Acquires Big Chunk Of SCO 78

Posted by Hemos from the expansion-through-co-option dept.
It came across the wire today that Caldera Systems is buying a big chunk of SCO. Caldera is buying SCO's Server Software and Professional Service Divisions from SCO, giving SCO 28% of the company. As well, one of Caldera's major investors is loaning $18 million to SCO, who will be keeping their Tarantella Divison - the press release has the other statistics in mind-numbing detail. The company is being renamed from Caldera Systems to Caldera, Inc. and Ransom Love [?] (who I think should win coolest CEO name) will remain as CEO.
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Caldera Buys Big Chunk of SCO More

Caldera Buys Big Chunk of SCO

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  • This is only the beginning! After all, SCO was once a Microsoft subsidiary.

    Muahahahhaha!

    Total world domination!

    --

  • SCO committed to open source model (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    As a top-flight professional consultant with many years experiance in the enterprise IT community I've worked with SCO in the past year or so, helping them with their plans for moving their primary focus from UnixWare to Linux in order to capitalise on the increasingly trendy Open Source movement as epitomised by such "gurus" as Eric Raymond (the suit's friend!) and Richard Stallman (the ideologue).

    Anyway, to cut a long story short from all of the indications that I got from working with some of their middle managers they as a company are commited to refocusing their brand to a more open source-friendly image. This takeover makes sense given the new product strategy embraced by SCO, and will provide increased mindshare and a better product for everybody. So everybody wins!

    Some of the more tech-savvy of my agency's clients have been asking about SCO's plans already since SCO is a trusted presence in the enterprise UNIX world, and many of the more sensible CTOs are still concerned about the validity of the business model that most Linux companies are using at the moment. They don't want to be caught with their pants down when RedHat et al. go down the plug, but they know they can trust a name like SCO, which is the most important thing.

    So, this looks like it could be a winner for everyone, and I made a big fat fee out of it :)

  • well, ZD Net has a poll going on about your favorite distribution and Caldera was in the lead (by far) all of yesterday
  • Means that they bought UNIXWARE and OpenServer.
    OpenServer is a piece of crap but UNIXWARE is pretty cool.

    For those who don't know UNIXWARE is the "last" and "latest" of the "ereal" unix kernels from AT&T.

    This could be very good for Linux if Caldera opens it up.
  • That article did not answer the one question I wanted to know. WHO will own the UNIX name. If Caldera got it we might get linux and BSD using the UNIX name. That would be boost to corportate credibility.

    James.
  • SCO is an offshoot of Microsoft. At one time MS owned a large stake in the company. Remember MS-Xenix? Well it evolved into SCO Unix and is now known as OpenServer. Unixware is SYS-V v4 which SCO bought from Novell who themselves bought it from USL, a company spun off by AT&T when it combined the features sets of Sys-V and BSD to create Sys-V v4. From what I understand, companies which market derivatives of Sys-V, such as Sun with solaris, pay SCO licensing fees because SCO owns the code that the other versions are derived from. So that makes me wonder, does Caldera now own this code? Wouldn't that be ironic? A linux company having the IP rights to Unix. But from the press release it seems that this probably isn't the case. "SCO will retain its Tarantella Division, and the SCO OpenServer revenue stream and intellectual properties." But what about Unixware? Where does that come into play? Did it go to the tarantella division? I know that IBM is working with SCO on monterey, which I'd assume is derived from unixware. So it probably didn't change hands either. So what Caldera got was the customers which SCO didn't want anymore. SCO realizes that its lost the server market that OpenServer once competed in to linux. SCO is cutting its losses so that it can concentrate on its Tarantella middleware, which has already been partially ported to linux. So instead of continuing to try to compete with linux, SCO decided to cash in on linux the best way it could, selling a middleware package FOR linux. They could have created their own distribution, but they've been in the game too long to be that foolish. The number of linux distributions will shrink in the coming years. The industry will likely consolidate around a dominant distribution, with many smaller niche distributions filling in the gaps. SCO knows that it is too late in the game at this point to throw its chips in as well. The future money to be made in the linux game will not come from distributions, but from the commercial software which runs on top of them. Companies which sell high quality software, for which there is no viable free alternative, are the ones which will reap the greatest financial benefit from linux's popularity. If I had any money I'd invent in SCO right now because they clearly understand this. Lee
  • I noticed over at the IEEE Computer Fair website [ieee-computer-fair.org] that Ransom Love is giving a keynote address. I bet he'll also be able to go into some detail about their plans for SCO.
  • One of the most popular cash register systems in the world runs on SCO.....Mircos
  • Since SCO no longer owns the UNIX trademark it couldn't have been passed on to Caldera anyway.

    The UNIX registered trademark is owned by The Open Group, they also own Motif, OSF/1, X/Open.
  • The Unix Trademark, well UNIX actually, belongs to the The Open Group, not SCO. Don't let the name fool you, it's all about open standards, not open code. See

    http://www.unix-systems.org/trademark.html

    for more than you may have wanted to know.

    Caldera does get UnixWare, the press release didn't make that clear. More on who owns what and how will emerge later today. Some of it, however, will end up open source.

    For my take on the deal so far see:

    http://www.zdnet.com/sp/stories/news/0,4538,2610 717,00.html

    Steven

  • "There's got to be more to this story. Else why reassure us that Ransom Love will "remain CEO"? I mean, duh, he is buying (part of) another company--why WOULDN'T he remain CEO?"

    I think because the board of directors of those two companies decide who will be the CEO. Sometimes, the company which is bought has a CEO with a better track record.

  • In with the new.

    You know what is really funny about this ? Caldera will now be the 1st publicly traded Linux company with seriously large revenue on display. Who knows, they may even make some hefty profits.

    SCO keeps Tarantella which gives them an immense amount of flexibility. With only a cross platform midleware type product in it's portfolio, SCO can now pick and choose partners at will. More likely however, it will try to get acquired by somebody else. Dose IBM want them ?

    SCO Unixware is nice and all. If I was Caldera, I would kill it slowly. This means putting most of the development staff responsible onto more profitable future products and sending maybe 1/2 of them home ( Veteran programers don't stay unemployed ). The rest will be kept to do only bug fixing for the next 5 years or so and to move any useful technologies over to Linux.

    For the record, Open Sourcing the entire OS is impossible since SCO doesn't own all it's code and never did. Even MS probably still has stuff in there. It is also a bad idea since something this huge will probably cause more trouble then anything.

    The real cash cow for Caldera will be professional services. Caldera has 5 OSs to support now ( by my count ). Expand this Professional Services to support everyone else's software too and suddenly Caldera has leapfrogged into what RedHat and Linuxcare claim they want to be when they grow up.

    Som how this reminds me of AOL buying Time Warner or EBay buying that old Auction house.

    Out with the old. In with the new. Indead.

  • No cigar. Here's what you never reported. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    While not a subsidary, Microsoft did own a large chunk of SCO. About 20% at one time.

    Unfortunately, the press never reported on why Microsoft ended up owning all of this; presumably because Intel, ATT, SCO, et. al., tried their best to keep it quiet.

    Back in the mid 80's, Intel was pushing their reference port of ATT UNIX. The first to pick this up was Microport, followed soon by ISC, Bell Technologies, Everex, and a couple smaller outfits.

    Unfortunately, no one, including SCO, was paying ATT their royalties at that time. For at least a couple of years.

    This was when all the cheap UNIXes were available. But then ATT figured out that they weren't getting their royalties. Once that hit the fan, everyone soon folded. Microport went belly-up, Intel "bought" BellTech (Intel could make it look better on the books). Everex hung around for a while, but they were also a hardware company.

    But the kicker is that SCO owed a bunch of money to ATT. Actually, SCO owed it to Microsoft, who owed it to ATT. Microsoft paid up, but in return carved out a large chunk of stock of SCO, which they sold a few years ago.

    Oh yeah - your article was wrong as well. There was *binary* compatibility during this time among all the smaller versions of UNIX. But SCO did their best to sabotage this, including using the threat of lawsuits via Microsoft.

  • as long as I know, SCO was the only one that could officially use the name "UNIX" for their operating system. All others should be named "unix-clones". The other only one "Unix" was Compaq/Digital/OSF. Things might have changes in the years though.
  • $ ls -l /usr/local
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Jul 19 22:34 /usr/local -> /opt/

    There's quite a bit of software that installs in both locations [/opt and /usr/local]. Some people just keep it simple by creating an /opt partition and symlinking /usr/local to /opt.

    There's also some argument for creating a symlink from /home to /u, since older software configurations use that [Minix uses /usr as the base of the /home directories]. When I'm dealing with a shell that doesn't readily have tab completion on a system, it's faster to type /opt or /u than /usr/local or /home (:
  • You mean other than the fact that, if you try to dump 5.5 million shares of any stock, it will go in the crapper? ;)

    Good point! ("A GoodPoint for GoodPint" - boom boom!! :) )
    As it happens 1.3 million were by private transaction, so it wouldn't really affect the share price. But I wonder who was the poor bastard that got stiffed on the other side of that deal?!

  • The first I can't speak for but the as far as 3 There is LVM and POOL (GFS) and for 4. again GFS. Nuff said.
  • Here are some Ransom Love remarks made after the acquisition:

    "We don't have to give everything back in a free fashion."

    "We intend to provide our technologies in an open access mode - not necessarily giving it all away in the public domain or under one of the licenses that forces us to give our technology back."

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/cont ent/1/12339.html [theregister.co.uk]

    Ransom Love is a snake. He stuffs his pockets with money from GNU and Linux supporters yet criticizes the license that keeps the software free from money-mongers like himself. (LinuxToday censored my post saying the same thing.)

    Also look at how their PR calls "Caldera, Inc." a "new holding company" while in THE SAME PR saying that "Caldera, Inc. was founded in 1994". Methinks there's some truth-bending going on around here.

    --
    This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.

  • Caldera targets their packages to major companies and VARs. OpenLinux has always been positioned as "Linux for business". The downside of this is that few induvidual hacker types use it, which in turn means that it's not always so well supported by the "community".

    One thing you'll notice is that while most commercial Linux distributions are perfectly willing to inflate their version number to play "keeping up with Red Hat", OpenLinux is still at 2.x (2.4 for Caldera eDesktop).

    So anyway, many places use Caldera. You just don't hear about them. Probably because their users like it too much to complain :)

    -- Floyd
  • copition ?
  • I think before this can happen again somebody has to be on the way down, or atleast their Unix flavor must be. SCO was very weak, and thus ripe for the taking. I think this is probably going to be the last we see of this for a while anyways.

    The only _remote_ possibility I can see is if IBM all of a sudden decides to accelerate their support of Linux by opening up AIX and merging the code base with Linux. Which, I believe is about as plausible as MacOS merging with BeOS.
  • It seems to me that Caldera is trying to get more
    into the services area. Red Hat has a very big marketshare in the server area and is very popular
    due to its stability in the open source community.
    SCO is very popular in the business for its long
    commercial support.
    Caldera does not have a major share of this commercial support area, which can produce tons
    of money. So by buying parts of SCO they get into
    the billion dollar game.
    Makes perfect sense to me.
  • It would be cool, albeit improbable, to have free bin Xenix

    Not Xenix, that's owned by the boys from Redmond.

    Recent versions of UnixWare can't even run Xenix binaries, so SCO didn't have to pay a Microsoft tax on every copy. (All praise the EU!)

  • "coolest CEO name" (Score:3)

    by acb ( 2797 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @04:12AM (#886459) Homepage
    I think that's a Utah Mormon thing. They have a long-standing tradition of giving their children really unique names [geocities.com], which perhaps arose as a reaction to the limited range of family names in the original Mormon colony.
  • "Is it really worth it?"

    For a boss named could be Ransom Love, I would sell out my mom.
  • The big problem is that two of the interesting parts of UnixWare, the Veritas file system, VxFS, and the volume manager, VxVM, were bought from Veritas so they might have a bit of trouble freeing that.

    NonStop clusters for Linux would be pretty impressive though.

    (no, it is not at all the same thing as Beowulf).

  • Uh.. what the hell is a "top-flight professional consultant"? How does it compare to "bottom-flight professional consultants"??
  • Anyone who's worked on the slave-ship which was Experian (customer data warehousing company -- seriously expensive Oracle databases, and truly horrific management practices) will occasionally use that one to identify themself to fellow survivors. As in "It was a learning experiance"
  • I think if they swapped colors (red blue), the "C" might stand out a bit more... I thought it was mickey on the globe when I first saw it...
  • From the press release:

    SCO will retain its Tarantella Division, and the SCO OpenServer revenue stream and intellectual properties.

    I am confused as to what falls under the "OpenServer" division. Obviously, this includes OpenServer, but does it also include UnixWare, which seems to be decended from OpenServer?

    If UnixWare is part of OpenServer, then what is the "Server Software" division comprised of?
  • You forgot to mention OpenBSD merging with RMTX/OS.
  • Back in January Microsoft off-loaded over five and a half million shares of SCOC for over $100,000,000 (at approx $21 a share - it's now $3.25 - $3.50). Yahoo Insider Deals for SCOC [yahoo.com]

    What did they know that other people didn't? ;o)

    GoodPint

  • Re:This is only the beginning... (Score:4)

    by sjvn ( 11568 ) <sjvn AT vna1 DOT com> on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @05:55AM (#886468) Homepage
    Nah, SCO was never a Microsoft subsidary. Microsoft did their own Unix, Xenix, and then when they got Quick & Dirty Operating System, soon to become PC-DOS and then MS-DOS for cheap, they got out of the Unix biz and sold Xenix to SCO. For a brief while they jointly marketed and supported Xenix, that was it.

    For more on Microsoft, the Unix company, and the early days of SCO and Unix on Intel, see my column:

    http://www.zdnet.com/sp/stories/column/0,4712,26 06631,00.html

    Steven

  • "Is it just me or does the Caldera logo look a lot like some kind of Disney internet logo? I mean, look at the mouse ear there... is there something I don't know about?"

    No, both you and Caldera look like some kind of Disney internet logo.

  • You are misinformed. Linux lags behind UNIXWARE in several areas (and vice versa). Let's hope the juicy bits seep out.
  • what's wrong with Linux's lvm? [tucows.com] From I can tell, It is just as good the HPUX one. I don't know if SCO's implentation has more features/easier UI, but I found that LVM add's just a complexity layer. Unless you need a crazy amounts of space in a single directory, It
    is easier to split data at application level to different directories.
  • I haven't used it since version 1.2 untill last week when I found EDESKTOP 2.4 at BestBuy for $29.99 bundled with some commercial apps. At the same time I was getting ready to build a new workstation for the office, so what the heck I bought it. I've used slack and redhat for years, but I was really impressed with calderas 2.4 release. The install was killer for the average joe whois is from the windows world. Actually in terms of ease of use I think it's installer is better than win9x. It also came with partition magic and boot magic which for the newbie would be a good thing. During the install you get to play pacman while it's copying files too. :)

    I've been running it on this machine for about a week now, and it's doing well. I've had a few problems with some apps looking for something that is located in the wrong place. Caldera likes to stick alot of things in /opt for somereason. But it was all easy to work around. Matter of fact I'm typing a document in the supplied applixware that it came with, (it comes with star office too).

    One last note is the xwindows configurator, lizardx .... It's IMHO by far the best one yet. No more tweaking my conf files. Just answer the questions like normal, and it works. I did ned to use xvidtune to get it exactly perfect, but no big deal. Redhat likes to make my screen at a low resoltion with a huge scrolling background, which I always hate having to waste my time fixing by hand.

    Also for the newbies, it does have a web based configuration tool. I played with it, and it is alot better than linuxconf. I still perfer the oldschool methods though, probably because I've been doing it for years and want the power and flexibility, which of course is still do able.

    The only thing I didn't like about it. I literally installed every package it had including everything I'll never use :)(the install has a selection for this) And it doesn't have pine!!! Granted I don't use pine for my mail anyway, but for editing I use either pico or joe depending on my mood. no pico or joe. Had to go grab joe and pine off of freshmeat.

    I hope they keep up the great work on thier distro, it's probably the one that will actually take Linux to the consumer desktop market as an easy useable product for anyone to use. Oh yeah it had acrobat reader, flash4 and realplayer5 preconfigured out of the box and they were even runing out of netscape without doing anything.

    -Helmet
  • BSD/OS and FreeBSD will remain separate products. They will share some code, however.
  • errr... I'm not trolling!

    OK, it wasn't good humour, but it certainly wasn't a troll. Also, it wasn't moderated up to 2, it was posted at 2 because I've been posting for years and happen to have high enough karma.

    Of course, I should have chosen to post without the +1 advantage as this wasn't a serious comment - but I forgot.

    Sheez the trolls have gotten everyone jumpy :-(


    "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
  • Will this start/continue to be the trend? Will the various flavors of unix/linux start merging, now that they are driven by money (to some degree)?
  • I couldn't see any mention of opening the SCO source in the press-release, did anyone else or does anyone else know? All I could see was some weird Unix/Linux Open Internet mixture type thing.
  • I remember for the past several years all sorts of neat special purpose hardware that had drivers for NT or SCO... How long before there's some way to get that (possibly now obsolete and thus cheaply available) stuff running on linux, too?
  • There's got to be more to this story. Else why reassure us that Ransom Love will "remain CEO"? I mean, duh, he is buying (part of) another company--why WOULDN'T he remain CEO?
    --

  • Sure, SCO is (err, was) a well-established company in the field of x86 Unix, but I think we all know that Linux came along and made them obsolete overnight. I suppose that Caldera is doing this mostly to get the contracts that SCO has with it's customers, so that they can reap the rewards of moving the major enterprises from Xenix to OpenLinux. While I'm all for that, I'm not so sure what should be done with OpenServer and UnixWare. Given that commercial Unix vendors are so woefully behind the Open Source community, is it even worthwhile releasing them? There might be one or two good things in there, but let's face it, if there was OSS would have copied it by new. I advocate sending the whole mess to /dev/null and forgetting it ever existed.

    Once you've got your customers on Linux, they won't want to go back anyway :)

    -- Floyd
  • We are Linux, your code WILL be incorporated.

  • The logo (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @02:57AM (#886481)
    Does anyone else think they need to drop the "blue mickey mouse ear on a red globe" logo?

  • Why this makes sense (Score:3)

    by tilly ( 7530 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @02:57AM (#886482)
    Caldera is the Linux distributer whose policy centers on targeting the Value Added Reseller channel. This is exactly the market that SCO has the best ties in. So this gets rid of the considerable stigma that was associated with SCO's repeated attempts to knife Linux in the back, while taking advantage of that channel.

    Therefore this deal is a very natural fit.

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • ... police are investigating a man with the pseudoname "Ransom Love" who was reputed to have bought a huge lump of hash earlier today.

    Upon further investigation, the hash proved to be a dried cow flop. Ransom Love declined to comment.
    "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
  • You forgot to mention OpenBSD merging with RMTX/OS.

    Ironic, isn't it? I actually use OpenBSD, too.
    -- Floyd
  • I'm not overly fond of SCO UNIX, but I've used UnixWare in a few production situations and think it's a great product with some real technological advantages over OSS unices. In particular, UnixWare has a few "grown up" features that I would love to see open sourced:

    1. ACL-based, granular security with roles and auditing. For a secure system, the all-powerful root HAS to go.

    2. An SMP implementation that scales.

    3. Logical volume management. Win2k (and NetWare, and VMS, and Solaris, and UnixWare, and SCO Unix, etc...) kicks our ass here, as much as it pains me to admit it.

    4. VxFS. (OK, so this is licensed from Veritas and can't be opened up, but I can dream.)

    Most of these aren't fun or cool to implement, but serious production environments really need them, and commercial Unixes, NetWare, VMS and now Win2K all offer these features.

  • unixware !--> monterey. Monterey is based on AIX with some features from UW included. UW falls under Server Software and is thus part of the deal. I believe that UNIX will go with the Server Software Division
  • what's wrong with Linux's lvm? From I can tell, It is just as good the HPUX one.

    IIRC, UW uses Veritas's VxVM, which has features the HP-UX LVM doesn't have. But either way, any volume manager makes administering disk space much more flexible, because you no longer have to split your filesystems on partition or disk drive boundaries.

    Plus, you can increase the size of a logical volume on the fly, and in many cases (including HP-UX) increase the size of the filesystem itself without having to rebuild it from scratch.

    Yes, it adds a layer of complexity, but once you've gotten used to the capabilities it adds, trying to manage filesystems without it is like trying to type with your nose.

    [ObTopic: Having worked at USL and Novell on UnixWare in the mid 90's, I'm sad to see it get kicked around yet again. I still think it's a great product. Plus, it's hard on the employees, who have to deal with a new employer every few years.]

  • >>I'm not aware of any sites still running either of the SCO unix implementations in anger.

    If you ever get a visit from a Revenue Officer with the Internal Revenue Service, check out the laptop that s/he is using. It's 100% SCO OSR 5.0.4. Suffice it to say that behind the Treasury Dept firewall, all the servers set up to directly support those folks are also OSR 5.0.4. Thus we have many thousand *very* serious users with all their *totally* mission-critical apps running under SCO Unix.

    It's old. It's not fancy. But it works. And with big clients like that, SCO definitely brings value to this deal.
  • Is it just me or does the Caldera logo look a lot like some kind of Disney internet logo? I mean, look at the mouse ear there... is there something I don't know about?
  • I agree completely. I use OpenLinux 2.3 at work and at home. The only real problems I've ever experienced is having the right lib files, but I've been able to download new libs and get them to work.

    Oh and the reason they put things in /opt is because that's where things are supposed to go!

  • Wake Up and Smell the Penguins Burning (Score:3)

    by Bizzaro ( 14691 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @07:40AM (#886491)
    This is a match made in Heaven.

    I have always considered Caldera and SCO to be a perfect match, not on technical but philosophical grounds. Opinions expressed by the CEOs of BOTH companies have revealed a deep-seated resentment toward GNU/Linux and the GPL.

    Caldera's Ransom Love made that painfully clear in his whining speech at Comdex, where he called the GPL "restrictive" for not allowing people to violate it (i.e., not allowing Caldera to violate it) and that such strict control made it "proprietary":

    http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,25 52025,00.html?chkpt=zdhpnews01

    And we all know too well how SCO and its CEO have made Linux part of its business with one hand while publicly stabbing Linux and its supporters in the back with the other hand:

    http://www.xos.nl/misc/sco.html

    I wish the two vampires a wonderful and bloody honeymoon.

    And be careful when you say that this is a "victory for Linux, because Caldera is a Linux company". Caldera was competing with Micro$oft on M$'s own turf (remember DRDOS) before they found the goldmine in Linux.

    --
    This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.

  • It's important to note that despite what has been written in some of the press, SCO owns the rights to some of the original Unix code, but doesn not own the rights to the trademark.

    If you want a Unix sourcecode license, SCO sold them.

    If you want to use the Unix name, you have to talk to The Open Group.

    Still, it would be nice if they would GPL portions of the Unix sourcecode and get them integrated into Linux so that the press would stop calling Linux a Unix-LIKE OS.
  • Well in the true unix world :) I've rarely seen much stuff in /opt over the linux years, except in caldera stuff.
  • Ransom Love (who I think should win coolest CEO name) will remain as CEO.

    Not mentioned in the story is the news that Ransom's brother, Buddy, will be responsible for media relations and EEOC-enforcement for the new SCO acquisitions.

  • I sort of agree with you...

    for (1), I think that it won't so much be Caldera soliciting their customers to move to Linux, it will just try to capture all the customers who have already decided to go to linux and are just beginning to implement it.

    For (2), I agree with the earlier poster who stated that SCO Unix can never be opened completely because SCO doesn't even own all of it. Likely they will open parts of it, and port parts of it to Linux.

    My expectation is that they will create a so-called "high-end" Linux distribution, with some SCO software (mostly userland) in it, specifically targeted to people migrating from SCO Unix.

    Not a distribution for you and me, but very attractive for some people.

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

  • BSDI/FreeBSD merger (Score:3)

    by Floyd Tante ( 210193 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @02:59AM (#886496)
    If you read Slashdot or other news sources, you might have noticed that BSDI [bsdi.com] and Walnut Creek [cdrom.com] (a major supporter of FreeBSD) are merging. What this means is that BSDI and FreeBSD themselves are going to eventually merge as the BSD/OS (BSDI's product) is gradually Open-Sourced. While this "daemon mating" is another example of commercial/open source merging, I don't see it happening to any large degree.

    (Having said this, there will probably be a "HP/UX - OpenBSD merger" story posted next :)

    -- Floyd
  • It's merely speculation on my part, but I would expect Caldera to do a couple of things.

    1. I think its likely that the first thing Caldera is going to do is get the SCO customer database merged with their own. I would imagine, that those customers are probably going to start getting offers/solicitations to move to Linuz.

    2. I am also pretty confident that SCO Unix will be opened up, if just to keep it alive long enough to pick it clean and incorporate whatever may be appropriate into Linux.

    3. Try to win over the various SCO VAR's as well as some of the application vendors to Linux.

    I would be very surprised if Caldera didn't do any of those three.

  • Why do all of these companies feel that it is
    acceptable to lie? Wouldn't "no comment" be
    more appropriate? Even seeing "get lost" when a
    reporter asked those questions would be better
    than a lie.
  • Does anybody still use caldera?

    Red Hat is really popular and from what I can tell, getting all the business.

    --

    CashWars [cashwars.com]

  • A little more background on the "investor" (Score:4)

    by jht ( 5006 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @03:29AM (#886500) Homepage Journal
    The Canopy Group [canopy.com] is Ray Noorda's private venture capital company that he started after leaving Novell. He funds just about anything that'll take a shot at Microsoft, like Willows Software, Caldera, and Palm cloner TRG. He also has money in Troll Tech, too.

    Ray Noorda is really the perfect sugar daddy for what's left of SCO. He's ridiculously rich (not Gates level, but he has enough to fund a lot of startups) and he hates Microsoft. And he already owned Unix once - he's the one who had Novell buy Unix System Labs back in the early part of the '90s. I met him some years back (and I'm friends with some people whe are and have been connected with him), and, based mostly on the word of the people I know, I consider him to be one of the few Good Guys in the business.

    - -Josh Turiel
  • The one name better than Ransom Love is...

    Havoc Pennington.
    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
  • As long as I can understand, SCO retains the "intellectual properties", which should mean that Caldera won't become owner of "UNIX" trademark, right? And also, they write "OpenServer" everywhere, but UnixWare is not named, and unixware ---> Monterey. OpenServer is an almost discontinued product, keept alive just for its wide accounting software base.

    I am understanding that Caldera is buying openserver and not unixware, and without any right about the Unix name. They buy unix without buying it... strange.

  • Correction... (Score:3)

    by jht ( 5006 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @03:34AM (#886503) Homepage Journal
    I had a brain cramp and mentioned the wrong TRG. Noorda's TRG _isn't_ the Palm cloner one, it's the one that works on clustering software (the former Wolf Mountain guys from Novell). I haven't had my coffee yet, sorry.


    - -Josh Turiel
  • SCO's an anachronism that should have been left to die years ago. As someone who had that abomination that was SCO unix placed on them at work years ago, I just wondered what was the point of it even then. Slow, cumbersome, and unable to fully use all of the available hardware. Even back in 1994 I was using Linux instead of SCO Unix for general Unix connectivity troubleshooting, as it worked!. SCO Unix at that time was awful - things were broken and you had to pay serious money for things like compilers, TCP/IP, NFS or anything else remotely useful.

    What are Caldera going to get out of this, now that most SCO shops have already migrated one way or the other? A few customer accounts, perhaps? I'm not aware of any sites still running either of the SCO unix implementations in anger. Certainly not many opportunities to get a return on investment.

  • Then you probably do not consider Solaris to be in the "true" Unix world...
  • I have used Caldera OpenLinux since 1.1 when it still shipped with Looking Glass. I currently have eDesktop 2.4 installed.

    I have always had several distributions installed at once, but the only two which have consistenly had shares of my hard drive(s) since I first tried them are Slackware and Caldera OpenLinux. Why?

    It is done well. Quality counts, and some distributions over the years have not had it.

    • Caldera OpenLinux 1.1 was the first to ever get my rather odd printer setup correct during install.
    • The LISA installer (which can still be chosen, even on the latest 2.4 release), with saved configuration & network install capability and great module support, is IMHO the best Linux installer to date in terms of power and of hardware preconfiguration.
    • LISA also allows me to choose every single package I want in the system so that I can assemble just what I want and cut out wasted megabytes.
    • Source nearly always compiles "right out of the box" on OpenLinux systems with devel packages installed, while other distributions (esp. Debian and, in the past, Red Hat) have choked on some percentage of source code.
    • Over the years, I've found it to be more stable than many other distributions.
    • It was the first to ship with an office suite (StarOffice 3.1 with OpenLinux 1.x) and an integrated environment that was pre-configured and usable (Looking Glass, then later, KDE 1.0).
    • It stays reasonably current (i.e. early adoption or availability of glibc 2.0, 2.1, egcs, bash 2.0, kernel 2.2, while some [debian, slackware] hung back for long periods of time).
    • It does all this while (I repeat) remaining very stable -- OpenLinux 1.3 and eDesktop 2.4 have especially been very, very solid all the way around.


    So I hope that Caldera sticks to tradition and doesn't end up looking more like SCO, which is a pile of buggy, nearly unusable swill that nobody should buy when *BSD can be downloaded and Solaris is still available.

    Caldera is looking for some of SCO's customers here, that's all (at least, I hope that's all). It doens't seem like they really got much software IP, so hopefully we're not looking at some bastardized "SCOpenLinux" or something... That might finally pull OpenLinux/eDesktop off of my hard drive and I'd be left with Slackware, which is where I started my Linux adventure all those years ago... *sniff*

  • Same goes for HP-UX.
  • The only thing I didn't like about it. I literally installed every package it had including everything I'll never use :)(the install has a selection for this) And it doesn't have pine!!! Granted I don't use pine for my mail anyway, but for editing I use either pico or joe depending on my mood. no pico or joe. Had to go grab joe and pine off of freshmeat.

    You should have sent an email to support@calderasystems.com to get your free support. They would have made your day complete by telling you that pine is on the Installation CD in the contrib directory. :-) Cheers!

  • I don't know how much business Caldera is getting, but I know for an absolute fact taht Redhat is not getting all the business.

    SuSE is still going gangbusters, Mandrake keeps making Redhat look behind them, Corel is due out with v2 real soon, Slack just came out with v7.1, ad infinitum. On the non-Linux side, the FreeBSD camp is starting to get some serious attention.

    This is not the Windows world. People won't run a particular distribution just because everyone else is. Once you've had a taste of free choice, you won't go back. Most of us don't give a rip what distro our neighbor is using.
  • Oh so now I've been "moderated" to a troll.

    The moderation system stops working when it becomes a system to discredit or gag individuals with unpopular opinions.

    If you disagree with me, have the balls to say so and the evidence to back your own opinions up with. "Moderating" me down only proves you can't stand to hear what I've said and have nothing with which to refute it.

    Lee
  • Where will this take Caldera's stock? I decided to throw some money down and of course bought the stock at its peak, and now it's down to half what I got it for. Anyone care to venture whether this will help or hinder?
    ______

  • Re:A trend? Caldera OpenXenix! (Score:3)

    by Surak ( 18578 ) <surak&mailblocks,com> on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @03:08AM (#886512) Homepage Journal
    I can see it now! Caldera OpenXenix! "The closest thing you'll ever get to Microsoft Linux!" Features KDE running on top of SCO (formerly Micros~1) Xenix! Regular crashes! You'll think you're running Win95, except it'll look like Unix! Yeah!

    :)

  • Re:So are they going to Open the Source? (Score:3)

    by TheReverand ( 95620 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @03:10AM (#886513) Homepage
    Well according to the article,

    SCO will retain its Tarantella Division, and the SCO OpenServer revenue stream and intellectual properties

    So I would assume that SCO is keeping the source for OpenServer. It doesn't mention UnixWare anywhere but this statement may apply to that as well.

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