SCO Group
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled. If you are prevented from editing this page, and you wish to make a change, please discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or create an account. |
| The SCO Group | |
 |
|
| Type | Public (NASDAQ: SCOX) |
|---|---|
| Founded | Santa Cruz, California (SCO, 1979) Lindon, Utah (Caldera, 1994) |
| Headquarters | Lindon, Utah, USA |
| Key people | Ralph Yarro III, Chairman Darl McBride, CEO Bert Young, CFO Ryan E. Tibbitts, General Counsel Ransom Love, Founder (Caldera) Doug Michels, Founder (SCO) Larry Michels, Founder (SCO) |
| Industry | Operating system software |
| Products | UnixWare, OpenServer |
| Revenue |  $36.0 million USD (2005) |
| Net income | ($10.7 million) USD (2005) |
| Employees | 166 (2005) |
| Website | sco.com |
The SCO Group, Inc. (TSG, informally SCO; NASDAQ: SCOX) 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.
Contents |
History
- See also: Caldera OpenLinux
Caldera Systems, based in Utah, was founded in 1994 by Bryan Sparks[2] and Ransom Love [3], receiving 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 [4] 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 SCO-Linux lawsuits and controversies 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
- SCO UnixWare, a modern UNIX operating system. UnixWare 2.x and below were direct descendants of Unix System V Release 4.2 and was originally developed by AT&T, Univel, Novell and later on The Santa Cruz Operation. UnixWare 7 was sold as a "best of breed" UNIX OS combining UnixWare 2 and OpenServer 5 and was based on System V Release 5. UnixWare 7.1.2 was branded OpenUNIX 8, but later releases returned to the UnixWare 7.1.x name and version numbering.
- SCO OpenServer, another UNIX operating system, which was originally developed by The Santa Cruz Operation. SCO OpenServer 5 was a descendant of SCO UNIX, which is in turn a descendent of XENIX. OpenServer 6 is, in fact, an OpenServer compatibility environment running on a modern SVR5 based UNIX kernel.
- Smallfoot, an operating system and GUI created specifically for point of sale applications.
- SCOx Web Services Substrate, a web services-based framework for modernizing legacy applications.
- WebFace, a development environment for rich-UI browser-based Internet applications.
- SCOoffice Server, an e-mail and collaboration solution, based on a mixture of open-source and closed-source software.
- Caldera WebSpyder, a webbrowser for DOS. Code from Arachne was bought and used.
- In late 2004, SCO announced the launch of the SCO Marketplace Initiative (http://www.sco.com/developers/marketplace/faq.html), in which it offers pay-per-project development opportunities.
- In early 2006, SCO publicly released Me, Inc, a mobile services platform. (http://www.sco.com/products/meinc/ )
SCO-Linux lawsuits and controversies
- 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[1]:
| “ | Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities. | ” |
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. [5]
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. [6] 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 [7]
On July 14, 2005, Groklaw obtained [8] an email [9] 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 *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever," Davidson concluded. At which time SCO presented as evidence an e-mail from a Robert Swartz, a consultant hired by SCO to compare UNIX and Linux source files, that copyright infringement could exist.
On November 29 and December 1, 2006, two critical decisions were released. In the first, Judge Dale A. Kimball affirmed Judge Brooke Wells' June 28, 2006 Order [10] striking most of SCO's claimed evidence of code misuse as being too vague to be worth adjudicating. In the second, Wells ruled from the bench in accepting IBM's motion to limit SCO's claims to those supported by evidence submitted by December 22, 2005 and not rejected by the court[11]. After the first ruling, Groklaw reported that "SCO is toast"[12]. SCO stockholders seem to have agreed and there was a run on SCO stock, which lost roughly 50% of its value in 3 days of exceptionally heavy trading.
References
- ^ The SCO Group, Inc. vs. International Business Machines, Inc. case number 2:03cv0294 United States District Court for the District of Utah doc #398 [1]
External links
- The SCO Group, Inc.
- SCO IP site
- Groklaw | News and Commentary about SCO lawsuits and Other Related Legal Information
Data
Charts
Click on the images to see larger versions.
 The SCO Group Revenue per Share (2002-2006) |
 The SCO Group headcount by department (2001-2006) |
 The SCO Group revenue by region (2001-2005) |
 The SCO Group revenue products vs services (2002-2005) |
 The SCO Group revenue by product classification (2002-2005) |
