SCO Group |
The SCO Group, Inc. (TSG, informally SCO), a former Canopy Group company formerly called Caldera Systems and Caldera International. After acquiring Santa Cruz Operation s Server Software and Services divisions, as well as UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, the company changed its focus to UNIX. Later on Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group to reflect that change in focus.
=History=
Caldera Systems, based in Utah, was founded in 1994 by Ransom Love, and received start-up funding from Ray Noorda. Its main product was Caldera Linux , a Linux distribution mainly targeted at business customers and containing some proprietary additions.
In 2000, Caldera acquired several UNIX properties from the Santa Cruz Operation, including OpenServer and UnixWare, proprietary operating systems for IBM PC compatible that would be expected to compete directly with Linux.
In 2002, Caldera joined with SuSE Linux, Turbolinux and Conectiva to form United Linux in an attempt to standardize Linux distributions. Later that year, Chief Executive Officer Ransom Love left the company and was replaced by Darl McBride.
Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group that year.
In 2003, the company asserted some of its products had been accidentally released into Linux by IBM in a breach of contract. From this, the CEO (Darl McBride) authored several press releases disqualifying several of SCOXs competitors; leading to legal action by Red Hat.
A new division called SCOsource was created to licence the company s intellectual property, selling technically an insurance against possible legal action against final customers, without proving that there is any IP infringement.
Not having any grounds to sue Linux final customers, and trying to persuade some of them to purchase such a license, they sued two of their own customers (Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler) for licensing problems and tried to make it pass as if the lawsuit were related to the fact of them being linux users.
SCO quickly became a bad word among rank-and-file Linux users. Humorously, in March 2004, a candidate named Scott lost the election for president of the BYU Unix Users Group after members of the club began calling him [http://spr.mahonri5.net SCO++].
After announcing its legal claims against various Linux users and vendors, (see The Linux Wars below), the company suspended sales and development of its Linux related products. Attention was shifted to the Unixware and OpenServer UNIX products previously acquired from the Santa Cruz Operation.
= Products =
= The Linux Wars =
: Main article: SCO-Linux controversies
The SCO Group is currently involved in a dispute with various Linux vendors and users. In this campaign SCO asserts that Linux violates some of SCO s intellectual properties. Although many are skeptical about their claims, SCO initiated a series of lawsuits and claims that, if upheld by the courts, may impact the future of both Linux and Unix. While making numerous public assertions that Linux infringes upon their Copyrights, the lawsuits themselves concern contractual issues which are tangential to the issue of whether or not Linux infringes any copyrights. Further complicating the issue is the legitimacy of SCO claims concerning the ownership of SVR4 Unix copyrights. The success or failure of the claims will also have a profound effect on the financial future of The SCO Group, itself. SCO has, to date, made little headway in this dispute. In particular, in February 2005, Judge Kimball, the Judge in the SCO v. IBM case has stated: Viewed against the backdrop of SCO s plethora of public statements concerning IBM s and others infringement of SCO s purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO s alleged copyrights through IBM s Linux activities.
===List of recent SCO lawsuits === *SCO v. IBM. *Red Hat v. SCO. *SCO v. Novell. *SCO v. AutoZone. *SCO v. DaimlerChrysler. (This lawsuit was not related to the various Linux copyright infringement lawsuits; rather, it dealt with a breach of contract.)
== Timeline ==
On June 28, 2002 Darl McBride become CEO of SCO, soon thereafter the company pursued litigation against IBM and Linux. McBride accused Linux of copying line-by-line SCO s proprietary source code in apparent contradiction to the subsequent Davidson email. [http://news.com.com/2100-1016-999371.htmltag=nl]
On February 17, 2005 the SCO Group issued a press release that stated their stock may soon be delisted from NASDAQ for failing to issue an annual 10-K report in a timely manner as required by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulations. [http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050217/lath062_1.html] In late April of 2005, after complying with the filing requirements, the NASDAQ switched trading of the SCO Group from SCOXE back to their original SCOX stock symbol.
On July 1, 2005, federal judge Dale A. Kimball denied The SCO Group s motion to amend their claim against IBM yet another time (a 3rd amended complaint) and include new claims regarding Monterey on the PowerPC architecture. In the same decision, the 5-week jury trial date was set for February 2007 [http://www.groklaw.net/article.phpstory=20050701182523700]
On . At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever, according to Davidson.
= External links =
*[http://www.sco.com/ The SCO Group, Inc.] *[http://www.sco.com/scoip/ SCO IP site] *[http://www.groklaw.net/ GrokLaw | News and Commentary about SCO lawsuits and Other Related Legal Information]
==Data==
*[http://finance.yahoo.com/qs=scox Financial information for The SCO Group (SCOX)] *[http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/99/99709.html Yahoo! - The SCO Group, Inc. Company Profile]|
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