SCO Unix Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart

[John Abreau]

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Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> writes:

> True. Caldera's business model was to shrink-wrap Caldera Linux and
> provide support for corporate clients. SCO had already been doing that
> for Unix worldwide. The basic concept is sound. But, most of the Linux
> community was comprised of technical people until recently. The other
> Linux distros proved to be more stable and easier to install. Red Hat,
> SuSE, and a few others have done a better job. 
> JABR may want to comment, but we've never installed Caldera at our
> installfests, and the people I know who have installed Caldera have
> abandoned it. 

I used Caldera's "preview 2" release back in 1994-1995. Before that I was 
using Slackware. I got a copy of Redhat, I think 2.1, at a gnhlug meeting 
at UNH where Linus was speaking, in late 1995 or early 1996 (If I recall 
correctly, it was snowing that evening). 

When I tried out Redhat, I discovered that Caldera was apparently just an 
earlier release of Redhat with a few proprietary add-ons. There was a 
graphical desktop shell, a true-type X font server, and some sort of 
Netware client, but the rest seemed to be straight Redhat. I initially 
thought the desktop shell was nice to have around when demo'ing Linux to 
Windows users, but it didn't work so well in actual day-to-day use. 

It was around this time that I dumped Caldera and switched to Redhat. 
I took it for granted that Caldera was a respectable member of the 
community for several years, though I never got around to trying out 
a later release of their distribution. I'm not aware of any actual 
contributions Caldera made to the Linux kernel. 

I'd heard they donated some hardware to a developer once, but I don't see 
how that would give them IP rights; that would be like Sherwin-Williams 
donating a bucket of paint to an artist, then claiming ownership of the 
copyright to the artist's paintings as a result. 


- --
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0xD5C7B5D9
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