SCO Group

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The SCO Group

logo
legal form Corporation
founding 1994
Seat Lindon , Utah
management Ken Nielsen
Number of employees 63 (2009)
sales $ 15.6 million (2009)
Branch software
Website www.sco.com

The SCO Group, Inc. is a software provider, particularly Unix - operating systems . Under the previous company Caldera Systems and Caldera International , the company had taken over large parts (UNIX Business, Service Business) of the earlier Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). Caldera International later changed its name to The SCO Group. Today the group offers the Unix derivatives UnixWare and OpenServer . The original SCO changed its name to Tarantella, Inc. Tarantella was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2005 and continued to exist there as a department; Tarantella has been part of Oracle since the acquisition of Sun in 2010 .

In addition to the Unix operating systems, the company has also been offering central services for accessing smartphones (PalmOS, Windows Mobile OS, Java) to server applications (“SCO Mobile”, “Me Inc.”) since mid-2006.

The SCO Group claims that with the purchase of Unix rights from the Santa Cruz Operation (still as Caldera Systems Inc.) all rights to the methods and concepts of the Unix operating system as well as a right to secrecy of the code of all Unix-based projects of the Unix licensees owned by AT&T . It has therefore sued the companies IBM , Novell , AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler . The lawsuits against AutoZone and Daimler have been settled. The software manufacturer Red Hat , for its part, has sued the SCO Group for defamation. See also SCO against Linux .

In September 2007 the SCO Group applied for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 of the American bankruptcy law. On December 27, 2007, the SCO Group share (symbol SCOX) was terminated on the US Nasdaq Stock Exchange . SCO renamed itself TSG Group, Inc. in 2011 .

On August 8, 2012, the SCO Group filed a request, from bankruptcy to Chapter 11 in the liquidation under Chapter 7 to change.

Company history

Caldera developed as a project within Novell . Shortly thereafter, Caldera, Inc. was founded in 1994 by Bryan Sparks (CEO) with financial assistance from Ray Noorda of Novell. The seat was in Utah , USA . The first product was the Caldera Network Desktop based on Red Hat Linux , later Caldera OpenLinux which was based on PowerLinux of the Linux Support Team s ( LST ). After LST Software GmbH was founded in 1996, it was taken over by Caldera in 1997 and became Caldera Deutschland GmbH. The target group for this system were commercial users, but the market success was moderate. In 1998 the company split into Caldera Systems (for the Linux and business business) and Caldera Thin Clients (for the DOS and thin client business). Ransom Love was the next CEO of Caldera Systems until the end of 2002, while Roger Gross took over the management of Caldera Thin Clients, the head of Caldera UK's development center for the DOS business. After the unsuccessful move of DOS development to the USA, the departure of Gross and the renaming to Lineo, Inc. Sparks took over the management of Lineo again, which concentrated on Linux thin clients. The parent company Caldera, Inc. was continued by Bryan Sparks until the end of the process against Microsoft. With the purchase of the server software division from SCO, Caldera Systems changed its name to Caldera International in August 2001. In the summer of 2002, Ransom Love left Caldera International and was replaced by Darl McBride . The name SCO was activated again and the name was changed to The SCO Group, Inc. in August 2002. This was to clarify the connection with the traditional Unix company SCO .

In March 2003, SCO raised allegations against the Linux community that parts of the source code of the Linux kernel had been taken from the original Unix source code, and initiated a lawsuit against IBM. In a parallel process, however, it was decided in August 2007 that Novell owns the copyright to Unix. See also: SCO against Linux .

On September 14, 2007, the SCO Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for restructuring, which means SCO's bankruptcy .

The way of SCO and Caldera Systems

One reason for the purchase of the SCO Unix product division by the Linux provider Caldera Systems was probably the SCO's own inventory of over 15,000 worldwide “value-added” resellers (VARs) who offered software solutions for customers. If, for example, a doctor's practice required a computer , several terminals , as well as accounting and medical software, these resellers offered the SCO-Unix operating system on Intel PCs and the required user programs . One of SCO's largest customers is the McDonald’s fast food chain , which uses SCO-Unix in the USA. According to SCO's assessment, the use of SCO-Unix is ​​due to the negligibly low operating system license costs in relation to the overall solution (in particular no maintenance fees, license costs depend on the CPU, RAM and software equipment of the computer) and a low so-called total cost of Ownership (TCO) because of rarely needed support. According to information from SCO, the average time between system stops is 20,000 hours, which enables a very high uptime (time without restarting the server). During the SCO Forum in Las Vegas 2004, a prize was awarded for the server with the longest uptime. The uptime was derived from system information sent in by SCO customers, including the "uptime" command output.

OpenLinux and OpenUnix

The terms "OpenServer", "OpenUnix" or "OpenLinux" for the Caldera products suggest that, in contrast to competing products, it is specifically open source software. However, “Open” stands for Open Standards - a term that has long been used in the computer industry, for example at OSF, X / OPEN or OpenGroup. In connection with SCO OpenServer and the (renamed SCO UnixWare) SCO OpenUNIX it has nothing to do with the term Open Source . It is correct, however, that numerous open source components (such as Perl , Apache and Samba ) are supplied with the SCO products. The operating system code is closed source .

Others

The SCO Group was part of the Canopy Group until March 2005. The share (SCOX) was listed on the Nasdaq until December 27, 2007 . After the security was threatened several times with so-called delisting (removal of the paper from stock exchange trading) (the Nasdaq announced that the paper no longer met the requirements for trading and that SCO had six months since April 29, 2007, the paper to meet the requirements again), the paper was banned from trading on December 27, 2007.

Locations

The company's headquarters are in Lindon , Utah . In the US, there are two other branches in Murray Hill ( New Jersey ) and Scotts Valley ( California ). The SCO Group GmbH , responsible for Germany, is located in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe .

Versions

Caldera OpenLinux
version date designation
1.0 5th February 1996 Caldera Network Desktop
1.1 May 4, 1997
1.2 February 23, 1998
1.3 September 28, 1998
2.2 April 19, 1999
2.3 September 13, 1999 OpenLinux eServer
2.4 February 21, 2000 OpenLinux eDesktop
3.1 July 2, 2001 Workstation, server
3.1.1 January 30, 2002 Workstation, server
SCO Linux ( United Linux )
version date
4.0 November 19, 2002

On May 15, 2003 the development of SCO Linux was stopped.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificates of Amendment to the Debtors' Certificates of Incorporation (Exhibit A) . Secretary of State of Delaware. May 6, 2011.
  2. heise.de
  3. lst.de History of LST on the club's website, accessed on November 23, 2010
  4. SCO OpenServer Release 6 Sales Guide ( Memento of the original from May 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) accessed on March 10, 2010 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.scobenelux.com
  5. Report on the delisting threat at heise.de
  6. Notification of exclusion from heise.de