SCO going Chapter 11

[Jerry Feldman]

On Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:38:02 -0400
"Matt Shields" <mattboston-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> I can't remember what they were called but it was mid-1990's

Essentially it was the Santa Cruz Operation that used SCO in their Unix
products. SCO (classic) has been around since the late 1970s as a Unix
company. They acquired the rights to Microsoft's Xenix in 1983. (I
worked for Raytheon Data Systems in 1978 - 1982, and we were porting
Xenix to a new machine we were building). In the early 1990s, John
Abreau and I put Xenix on a small PS/2 to use at the BCS as a mail
server. Xenix really sucked, but it was a real AT&T Unix kernel. SCO
was successful with desktop Unix in the 1980s and 1990s.=20

Caldera acquired the Unix division of SCO in late 2000, Santa Cruz
Operation then became Tarantella, and Caldera renamed itself the SCO
Group.=20

One thing you might notice in many of the court documents in both the
IBM and Novell case that The SCO Group likes to blur the line between
their own corporate history (eg. Caldera - a Linux distro company) and
the company whose division they acquired. However this did not pull the
wool over Judge Kimball's eyes. He has shown that he was well aware of
that acquisition even before the copyright issue came up in the Novell
case. The IBM case is more about breach of contract where not only is
IBM's perpetual license with AT&T but also the contract with Santa Cruz
on the Monterey Project which is a port to the Power PC. In the latter
contract, there is a stipulation about requiring IBM's permission
before any license transfer, which Santa Cruz failed to get, and IBM
actually sent a letter to Santa Cruz informing them that they did not
have permission.=20

In any case, I think it is interesting that SCO (the current gang of
idiots) had no clue they did not own the copyrights. Since we do not
know all that was in the Santa Cruz-Caldera purchase contract, I can
only assume that Caldera thought they were acquiring the copyrights
from Santa Cruz. The ownership of the copyrights is very important in
the IBM case because without those they really have much less of a
case, and the Judges (Wells and Kimball) already essentially had gutted
their case against IBM. At this point, I would suspect that IBM will
file a motion to dismiss as soon as the Novell case is adjudicated.
Since the trial begins on Monday, I would guess that it would be
adjudicated some time in October. Kimball seems to want to be rather
thorough here.=20
--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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