[ale] non-technical Linux question

Mon Feb 17 16:40:09 EST 2014

It sad that Caldera did that, because they did do some good. I
remember they bought Word Perfect to Linux, the first commercial Word
Processor Linux. I actually bought a copy of it, and book that came
with CD as well. I was excited that Linux was getting Professional
Software. Don't get me wrong Adword was good.

I think that also bought Art Software as well.  Coredel. I was hoping
it was going to come to Linux as well.

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 4:27 PM, Greg Clifton <gccfof5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> IIRC, at some point prior to the flurry of lawsuits and the licensing "deal"
> that SCO was offering, Caldera bought SCO and changed their name from
> Caldera to SCO. It was actually the Caldera crowd that "sank the ship" with
> all their unsuccessful lawsuits, trying to profit from extortion rather than
> product sales.
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 4:18 PM, Lightner, Jeff <JLightner at water.com> wrote:
>>
>> There's some debate about whether Novell "sold" or "licensed" and therein
>> was a major focus of the litigation that ultimately resulted in SCO's
>> demise.   Essentially SCO was claiming it "owned" "UNIX" and that everyone
>> else had "licensed" "UNIX" from AT&T who in turn sold it to Novell.  There
>> is no doubt there was a point at which Novell essentially contracted with
>> SCO to deal with the UnixWare offerings as well as SCO's own UNIX offerings.
>> The question was did Novell "sell" it or "license it".   SCO claimed that
>> IBM who was embracing Linux in a big way had improperly included proprietary
>> UNIX code (from AIX or OS/390 licensing) in OpenSource Linux so that meant
>> SCO owned Linux.
>>
>> You could check out Groklaw (or copies of stuff from there since it
>> stopped posting for separate reasons) for the whole sordid story.   Not
>> being a lawyer and doing this from memory my (possibly faulty) recollection
>> of it all summarized was:
>> 1)  The courts decided that Novell never "sold" UNIX - it licensed it to
>> SCO.
>> 2)  Not only did SCO not have rights to UNIX as used by anyone else it
>> actually owed unpaid license fees to Novell for what it had been doing with
>> UNIX itself.
>> 3)  Not only did they NOT find proprietary UNIX code in Linux, the code
>> that SCO challenged was actually Linux code improperly used in their UNIX
>> which meant SCO was in violation of the GPL.
>>
>> In the middle of all that SCO was offering a "license" to distro makers
>> that would exonerate them of any fallout if the courts did decide they owned
>> Linux but as I recall only Suse (a once-related company) was ever dumb
>> enough to sign a contract for that.
>>
>> The last I'd heard the "board" (a bunch of lawyers) of SCO fired the CEO
>> who'd started all the litigation.  It seems it had long since gone bankrupt
>> and its only "business" appeared to be the lawsuits.  That CEO either did or
>> said he would start an action against that "board" after his firing to
>> protect the interest of the shareholders (whose stock was now worthless
>> anyway so one wonders what he would be protecting).
>>
>> It was really a sad state of affairs.  In its day SCO UNIX was a good
>> product and unlike most other UNIX variants was designed to run on any intel
>> platform rather than proprietary hardware.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Paul
>> Cartwright
>> Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 3:45 PM
>> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
>> Subject: Re: [ale] non-technical Linux question
>>
>> On 02/17/2014 08:44 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
>> > SCO "Linux"?   I've never heard of that one.  I did work on SCO Xenix
>> > and SCO UNIX back in the early 90s.
>> >
>> > I had been working with various UNIX systems starting in the mid 80s
>> > (I'd been doing DOS before that and did Novell Netware) but they were all
>> > adjuncts to my full time job in accounting (early on computers were the
>> > responsibility of accounting departments mainly because they were first
>> > adopters of PCs for spreadsheets).   In 91 I got my first full time IT job
>> > doing various UNIX (anyone here ever heard of Astrix from NEC [NOT the PBX
>> > FOSS of today]?) flavors.    About 95-96 I changed jobs and although the
>> > main job was HP-UX many of us got Caldera Linux desktops.   That was pretty
>> > cool as it contained WABI from Sun so could run the Windows 3.1.1 crud the
>> > corporation used, rather seamlessly.   WINE was not a good alternative in
>> > those days.   Most of what I've done since then has been with various
>> > RedHat/CentOS/Fedora versions though I have also played with Debian on
>> > PA-RISC just to see it work.   I've also worked with other FOSS stuff like
>> > FreeBSD.
>> >
>> > HP-UX
>> > SunOS/Solaris
>> > Dynix
>> > AT&T UNIX
>> > NCR UNIX
>> > SCO Xenix
>> > SCO UNIX (and later Open Desktop - originally TCP/IP and X-Windows
>> > were separate add-ons that most installs didn't bother to buy) Novell
>> > UnixWare
>> Novell also sold Unixware to SCO:
>> http://www.xinuos.com/index.php/products/virtualization/unixware7plus
>>
>> I worked on AT&T Unix and we also had Unixware platforms for our IVR
>> group..
>>
>> --
>> Paul Cartwright
>> Registered Linux User #367800 and new counter #561587
>>
>>
>>
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