According to Wired, SCO is suing everyone. For those not keeping score, here is a short timeline of things in SCO-land…
The Santa Cruz Operation was a free-wheeling Unix company, producing licensed versions of the AT&T Unix operating system for x86 machines and mainframes. After Unix started to slide in profitability, most companies standardized on Sun for Unix stuff and Windows for cheap (read: not mission-essential) stuff. So, SCO was on the decline as Linux became a contender.
Linux on the desktop is the buzzword of the year, but it’s been building for a while now. One of the earlier Linux desktop proponents, along with Red Hat, was Caldera. Caldera did pretty well with their Linux distributions for newbies, and looked to be in the race for the long haul. I even reviewed Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 back in 1999.
Caldera spotted SCO on the auction block, bought them up for the intellectual property rights (Unix patents for System V), and started selling SCO Unix and Caldera Linux side-by-side. SCO Unix got the headlines, since you can legally copy and redistribute Linux to anyone for free. Profit motive is strong in this one…
In March of this year, SCO sued IBM for stealing their Unix secrets. IBM told them to fuck off, as I recall.
Now, SCO is saying they will cease producing Linux entirely (which used to be the only thing they made before Caldera bought SCO’s dead husk). And, they’re threatening suit against everyone who uses Linux, claiming that is is not “safe from legal encumbrances.”
Gee, I wonder what Raymond & Stallman will say about this one…
Previous 
Next 
Categories
Tag Cloud
Blog RSS
Comments RSS
Last 50 Posts
Back
Void 
Life 
Earth 
Wind 
Water 
Fire