Re: Back to the Nineties
The current company is actually "SCOG" (SCO Group), which is not the same company as the original SCO. The history went something like this:
* SCO and IBM entered into a joint venture to develop and sell a version of proprietary Unix. This version was supposed to cover the market from the small x86 box sector up to large RISC servers. IBM would contribute the large system expertise, and SCO would contribute the x86 box expertise (including marketing channels). Both parties hoped this would establish their joint brand of Unix as the industry standard.
* Meanwhile, Linux was starting to make inroads into the unix market, particularly at the lower end. Companies involved in selling and supporting it included Red Hat, Suse, and Caldera.
* SCO eventually saw the writing on the wall with regards to Linux, and decided to give up on the joint venture with IBM. They sold their unix business off to Caldera, who planned on converting the SCO Unix customers into Caldera Linux customers.
* When SCO pulled out, IBM exercised an option in the contract which let either party terminate the joint venture if the other party sold its interest. SCOG's current lawsuits against IBM revolve around this event.
* SCO sold themselves to Sun, who wanted them for their remaining software products. Sun of course were later bought by Oracle.
* The dot-bomb hit, tech stocks collapsed, and Caldera couldn't get free money from the stock market any more. Meanwhile Caldera was also not having a lot of luck selling their brand of Linux to their new customer base. Customers were opting to switch to Red Hat instead. They decided they needed a new business strategy. At some point in this Caldera themselves came under new ownership in circumstances which are as hazy and odd as their subsequent behaviour.
* Caldera renamed itself the "SCO Group" (SCOG), brought in new management, and went on a sue-world-plus-dog campaign using financing from certain companies who had an interest in seeing Linux dead.
* SCOG represented themselves as "owning" Unix. Novell, who in fact did (and still do) own Unix, having bought it from AT&T, disabused them of that notion in court. SCOG was just another Unix licensee like IBM, Sun, HP, etc. They also had a contract with Novell to act at the outsourced agent for collecting license royalties from the other licensees, and it was this role which they tried to use to represent themselves has having legal standing to sue others. Novell took them to court over this issue.
SCOG's lawsuits with IBM revolved around several issues.
* One was the termination of the above mentioned joint venture. This is still active.
* Another was over IBM's JFS file system, which although written and owned by IBM, SCOG claimed that IBM could not put this into Linux because of "wave hands and shout loudly" reasons. Unfortunately for SCOG, there were two different versions of JSF. The one which went into Linux actually came from OS/2, not AIX. This was the closest which any of SCOG's cases came to actually involving Linux, and it was something which would have had little impact outside of IBM even if SCOG had somehow won.
* IBM counter-sued SCOG over various issues that I can't remember, other than that they were narrow technical matters that would have been open and shut cases that would have been difficult to dodge if they came to trial.
As a footnote, when SCOG declared bankruptcy, they had to list all their creditors. Imagine the amusement we had when one of these creditors was a well known "independent industry analyst" who had been in the lead of trumpeting how solid SCOG's case was, and how Linux was doomed.