SCO's estranged relationship with Linux

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The SCO Group began its ill-judged and ultimately fateful legal action against IBM and the Linux community back in 2003, claiming that it owned the copyrights to Unix and UnixWare, and that Unix code had been 'stolen' and copied into the Linux kernel by IBM and others.

As everybody knows, the source code for the Linux kernel has always been there for all to see, yet SCO has repeatedly failed to come up with the 'stolen' goods. To rub salt in the wounds, Judge Dale Kimball has now declared that the copyrights to Unix belong to Novell, and that "SCO is obligated to recognise Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent", which judgement renders SCO's case against IBM effectively null and void.

The SCO Group was the offspring of a fitful marriage between the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and Caldera, a Linux company that performed a reverse takeover of two of SCO's divisions on 2 August 2000, three months before IBM announced its commitment to Linux.

Caldera's brand of Linux began as a skunkworks project within Novell. The project was led by Bryan Sparks and was codenamed 'Expose', and later 'Corsair'. When Ray Noorda, the founder of Novell, left the company, the skunkworks project was abandoned, presumably because Linux wasn't seen as an essential part of Novell's future business. Caldera was floated off during October 1994 to continue the Linux project, financed by Noorda and led by Sparks.

Sparks' role as chief executive of Caldera set a precedent. Each of SCO/Caldera's subsequent chief executives and many of SCO/Caldera's executives, had been ex-employees of Novell, including Darl McBride, the chief executive and prime instigator of SCO's 'Intellectual Property' siege on the computing industry.

In the Looking Glass

From the beginning, Caldera was not like other Linux distributions. The first official release included the proprietary 'Looking Glass' or Network Desktop, which meant that, unlike most other Linux distributions, Caldera's OpenLinux couldn't be legally downloaded or copied. Moreover, Caldera's adoption of the 'OpenLinux' moniker caused offence because it seemed to infer that Caldera's distribution was somehow more open than other versions of GNU/Linux, which it most definitely was not.

Such niggles confounded Caldera's relationship with the community from the beginning. Ransom Love, the immediate successor to Sparks, engaged in a famous spat with Richard Stallman, after Love had announced that Caldera would drop the GNU GPL (General Public License), the most common free software license, for future products because it was holding back its business. Love claimed: "We add value to Linux, so it can become successful. We integrate Linux in back office systems and we do all the marketing that's necessary. Did Richard Stallman ever invest $100 million (£50 million) in Linux? We did." Love asserted that the free software movement had "no clue" about marketing, and doesn't realise that "someone must pay for it", to which Stallman's curt response was that "Caldera's not a free software company at all. They are just a parasite."

Free software developers may have objected to the inclusion of proprietary software in Caldera's distribution but Love's defence was that "business doesn't care". He told Glyn Moody, a technology writer and author of the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution: "We did get a lot of criticism, and people were concerned then that Caldera was trying to take Linux proprietary. And they couldn't be more wrong. Because we never had an intention. Never have. Never will."

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