Of course Microsoft then licensed XENIX to the Santa Cruz Operation which after several years renamed it to SCO Unix. SCO eventually split apart, but the piece that ended up with SCO Unix renamed themselves the SCO Group. The SCO Group with (possibly indirect) financial backing from Microsoft, attempted to use XENIX in a number of copyright infringement lawsuits to attack Linux vendors.
Hmm, there are a variety of inaccuracies in your short statement. Please carefully read the below so that you can be protected from propagating these errors in the future.
· SCO Unix, although it incorporated some Xenix code, was very different from Xenix; it derived a lot from SVR4.
· SCO basically went out of business, because their value proposition was "Unix, but on a regular PC so you don't have to buy an expensive RISC workstation." This stopped being a useful value proposition around 1997 because they couldn't keep up with Linux. So they sold the SCO Unix product line to Caldera, a Linux distributor, in 2001. I'm not 100% sure but I don't think any employees moved from SCO in Santa Cruz, California, to Caldera, which was in Utah. Maybe someone stuck around to smooth the transition?
· Microsoft's backing of SCO was direct; they "bought a license" in 2003. Maybe they also did some indirect backing that I don't know about.
· Caldera basically failed in the Linux distribution space in 2002, and the investors booted out CEO Ransom Love and replaced him with Darl McBride, formerly of Novell, IKON, a couple of startups, and Franklin Covey (!).
· The copyright infringement lawsuits weren't based on Xenix. Nobody claimed Linux had copied from Xenix. Rather, they were based on Bell Labs Unix, from the 1970s, and AT&T Unix System Labs System V Unix. SCO had supposedly acquired the copyrights to these sometime in the 1990s, and in fact them giving permission is how the Lions book was legally republished in 1996 or 1997, but it turned out that in fact what they had acquired was not the copyright ownership, but a sublicenseable license to the copyright. The actual copyright rested with some company Novell had bought up at some point, so the lawsuit got thrown out of court.
· The SCO Group sued not only Linux vendors, notably IBM, but also Linux users, notably AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler. This is an error of omission, but it's crucially important.
I appreciate your critique, but stand by my original statement. Let me address the items you bring up point by point. Please excuse my brevity.
1. Xenix was based on Bell Labs V7 and then AT&T SVR2, SCO Unix was based on SVR4. Xenix and SCO Unix shared code in addition to that derived from their common ancestry. Claiming that they were "very different" is obviously a matter of opinion. In my opinion, they were pretty similar.
2. SCO split into two pieces: one was sold to Caldera, the other became Tarantella. As far as your hypotheses about why SCO failed, I'm not seeing why it is relevant to the discussion.
3. Microsoft indirectly backed SCO Group through BayStar capital. Please verify this for yourself with a quick web search so you will be protected from propagating your misinformation in the future.
4. Not relevant.
5. Both XENIX and SCO Unix were derived from the same original codebase. SCO Unix would not exist if it were not for XENIX.
6. Actually, I think the AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler lawsuits are fairly unimportant within the context of the original discussion. To me, the interesting point is that MS had the foresight in 1979 to see that Unix would become a big thing and as a result created Xenix. Decades later, when Unix (Linux) was indeed a big thing, by proxy, it attempted to use XENIX to fight back at Unix (Linux) proponents.
Regarding #1 that is mashing together two separate products into 1. (I worked for SCO.)
The history is that Microsoft were producing Xenix - a port from AT&T. Eventually they decided to stop doing that work themselves as DOS, OS/2, Lan Manager and similar were of interest. (Note though that they ran their email infrastructure on Xenix - it was part of their operational business.) Xenix was handed over to a father and son company in Santa Cruz. They called the company Santa Cruz Operation so that in phone calls to Microsoft, the Microsoft folks would think SCO was a branch office not a different company.
Xenix was updated, ported etc, eventually being called SCO OpenServer. That "SCO Unix" did not have SVR4 in it. Heck it could barely do multi-processor and similar. In 1995 Novell (owners of the AT&T Unix at that point) then "handed" SVR4 over to SCO, with the result being called SCO UnixWare. That was the SVR4 derivative. SCO did this to get into the enterprise space, and couldn't do the engineering to bring the Xenix derivative there.
Later in the 90s there was a game of musical chairs as Intel announced the Itanium, and all the Risc chip and Unix vendors formed consortiums. SCO was part of one with IBM named Project Monterey. It was supposed to have some Linux compatibility, but as time progressed IBM cared more about Linux (and AIX) while SCO couldn't keep up with the engineering commitments.
In 2000 all the Unix stuff (OpenServer and UnixWare) went to Caldera. Well it would have but the deal was so complicated (it was pseudo licensing with money and royalties going back and forth). Heck Caldera only really wanted OpenServer. The SEC went "huh" a while later, so a new deal happened in 2001. There was also a tech downturn, so a simpler deal was done. All that was left of SCO was Tarantella hence the company rename.
Caldera renamed themselves to The SCO Group a while later. The grounds for suing IBM were around Project Monterey, although as far as I know neither side did all they should have. And then since IBM had gone in on Linux, SCO Group decided to sue claiming IBM had put Unix code into Linux. Novell got involved because the details of "handing" over mattered.
Were you around when stuff moved over to Caldera? Were there SCO people who moved to Utah, or who became Caldera employees in California?
My condolences on having had such a shitty thing happen to such a beautiful company. I don't ever remember SCO Unix being a particularly great Unix, but it was pretty solid, and the company was awesome; it's a place I would have been proud to work if I'd had a chance.
I was around during the transition but I'd always been on the Tarantella side (I was an architect of the product) and so didn't work on the Unix side directly. Heck our division customers were overwhelmingly running Solaris with Linux picking up in the 2000's.
The Unix side of the business was rapidly shrinking. 1999 was a banner year because everyone had to go out and upgrade their operating systems so they could claim y2k compliance. 2000 was the end of a tech bubble, and also saw a tech downturn. This lead to drastically reduced sales. Throw in Linux getting increased adoption (remember that IBM promised to spend $1 billion on it which gave a lot of credibility), and that SCO's UNIX products no longer had particularly relevant sweet spots in the market.
I don't know of anyone who moved to Utah. The people in California became part of Caldera but I don't know exactly how that was legally structured. Also SCO had folks all over the US and world. At the peak it was ~1,100 employees and $250m annual revenue.
SCO was a good company and many people liked working at the company because they liked many of their colleagues. Employee turnover was quite low because of that. It also had bad points, but what doesn't?
SCO Unix (OpenServer specifically) was great but not from a technological viewpoint. However the vast majority of users were not techies - they were dentists, receptionists, pet cemetery workers etc. OpenServer came by default with a gui that let those regular folk get things done in a friendly way. See my sibling comment about why Caldera wanted OpenServer.
And SCO did have some firsts. It was also very good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It was the first company to offer Internet in a Box. You installed the system, and now were on the Internet (as a server). We were the first to ship a browser (licensed Mosaic). We shipped by far the most copies of Netscape. At one point Pizza Hut started allowing orders over the Internet. It was more of a proof of concept rather than massively used and widespread. But SCO was behind that too.
The reason why SCO was successful was because of how it is used. Imagine it is 1991 and you have a dentist's office you want to computerise. You go to a local VAR (value added reseller) and they would come in and install a complete solution. It would consist of a Compaq "server" ($5k), several terminals, com port cards for the server, a tape backup system, and some dental office management software. Oh and a $1,000 copy of SCO Unix. The VARs typically marked up what they sold by 15%, which is how they got paid. Two related bits of trivia - at one point the only software that existed for managing pet cemeteries ran on SCO OpenServer. And most McDonalds (I believe US only) had OpenServer in each branch.
By the late 90s SCO had 15,000 of these VARs. Caldera wanted to essentially substitute Linux for OpenServer into that setup, and make $1,000 per copy of the OS rather than $25. The VARs realised they could supply Linux themselves which is why Caldera had no traction doing that, and doubled down on SCO OpenServer and the existing installed base. Hence the company rename too - it was all SCO products.
UnixWare was touted as Enterprise ready. It did multi-processor well, had sophisticated filesystems (Veritas), could do clustering (Non-Stop) etc. But at the time most who wanted "big" Unix went to one of the RISC vendors each of whom had their own Unix. If they wanted to go Intel (which wasn't credible until the Pentium Pro) then the competition was Windows NT.
> MS had the foresight in 1979 to see that Unix would become a big thing
1978, I think. The idea that Unix would take over from CP/M seemed pretty common at the time. The main problems were the high Unix prices and the cost of the hardware required.
However, Microsoft got lucky with DOS on the IBM PC, and the PC market took off, and IBM also licensed Xenix....
Unfortunately, IBM decided that it needed to own the whole stack. This precluded using Unix/Xenix/etc as the PC client, which was a problem because Microsoft was now dependent on IBM. (Ballmer called it "riding the bear", followed by BOGU, for Bend Over, Grease Up.)
IBM finally published its strategy in 1987 as Systems Application Architecture (SAA), which mandated the use of the extended edition of OS/2 (not available from Microsoft) as the PC client. SAA also included IBM's PS/2 micros with MCA expansion buses, intended to break the link with the DOS-based PC industry.
Faced with possible exclusion from the IBM-controlled corporate market (1), the best deal Microsoft could get in 1985 was to co-develop OS/2, so Xenix -- despite having been by far the most popular Unix of its day -- became surplus to requirements.
Another factor was the arrival of AT&T's System V in 1983. This showed AT&T was serious about selling Unix, and maybe Microsoft didn't think it could compete. What it did was contribute small parts of Xenix to SVR4 (1988).
SVR4 was where AT&T & Sun decided to redefine and take over the IT industry, which led to the great Unix Wars and the creation of OSF etc. All of which infighting left the door open for Windows, DR-GEM, DesQview and many others....
Fun days....
(1) SAA flopped and IBM had to go back to making PC compatibles, so it turned out that IBM didn't control the corporate market as much as it thought.
I'd forgotten about the BayStar thing, but its existence seems to be debatable; someone at BayStar said they got a promise from someone at Microsoft to guarantee their SCO investment, but didn't actually fulfill the terms of the guarantee, and Microsoft denies any such guarantee ever existed. So it ends up being a he-said-he-said thing.
I interviewed at SCO in Santa Cruz, turned it down (was in a phase of life where I required a higher salary - too much dumb debt). The biggest thing they were concerned with was my ability to apply W. Edwards Deming's Statistical Analysis/Planning methods. Just from very short interviews it had the feel of being a "too suddenly large" company trying to get a handle on quality control.
True. I read about parts of that history on Groklaw as those later events unfolded. For a while there, IIRC, based on what I was reading then, it looked like they might have nearly succeeded. Good that it didn't happen. IIRC, parts of the industry rose up together against it, also individuals. Don't know the full details.
