116-526: The SCO Group (often referred to SCO and later called The TSG Group ) was an American software company in existence from 2002 to 2012 that became known for owning Unix operating system assets that had belonged to the Santa Cruz Operation (the original SCO), including the UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, and then, under CEO Darl McBride , pursuing a series of high-profile legal battles known as
232-437: A non-disclosure agreement , which had prohibited them from revealing the information shown to them. SCO claimed the infringements were divided into four separate categories: literal copying, obfuscation , derivative works, and non-literal transfers. The example used by SCO to demonstrate literal copying became known as the atemalloc example. While the name of the original contributor was not revealed by SCO, quick analysis of
348-429: A time-sharing configuration, as well as portability. Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text for storing data; a hierarchical file system ; treating devices and certain types of inter-process communication (IPC) as files; and the use of a large number of software tools , small programs that can be strung together through a command-line interpreter using pipes , as opposed to using
464-481: A time-sharing operating system for the GE 645 mainframe computer. Multics featured several innovations , but also presented severe problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics, but not by its goals, individual researchers at Bell Labs started withdrawing from the project. The last to leave were Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie , Douglas McIlroy , and Joe Ossanna , who decided to reimplement their experiences in
580-529: A "tremendous vendetta" against Microsoft and that Noorda had supported the Federal Trade Commission 's antitrust investigations of Microsoft in the early 1990s that led to a consent decree restricting its operating system licensing practices. Noorda ran Novell until 1993. He was succeeded by Robert Frankenberg in 1994. Around 1992, Noorda used the term co-opetition to characterize Novell's business strategy. Up to his death, Noorda owned
696-511: A 1999 interview, Dennis Ritchie voiced his opinion that Linux and BSD Unix operating systems are a continuation of the basis of the Unix design and are derivatives of Unix: I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as
812-565: A Linux release. Caldera International had been one of the founders of the United Linux initiative, along with SuSE , Conectiva , and Turbolinux , and the newly-named SCO Linux 4 came out in November 2002, in conjunction with each of the other vendors releasing their versions of the United Linux ;1.0 base. The SCO product was targeted towards the small-to-medium business market, whereas
928-596: A commercial interest in Unix technology itself, it did want to clear the way for Linux, having recently purchased SuSE Linux , the second largest commercial Linux distribution at the time. On January 20, 2004, the SCO Group filed a slander of title suit against Novell, alleging that Novell had exhibited bad faith in denying SCO's intellectual property rights to Unix and UnixWare and that Novell had made false statements in an effort to persuade companies and organizations not to do business with SCO. The SCO v. Novell court case
1044-460: A convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmers. The system grew larger as the operating system started spreading in academic circles, and as users added their own tools to the system and shared them with colleagues. At first, Unix was not designed to support multi-tasking or to be portable . Later, Unix gradually gained multi-tasking and multi-user capabilities in
1160-511: A decade earlier. On May 28, 2003, Novell counterattacked, saying its sale of the Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation back in 1995 did not include the Unix software copyrights, and thus that the SCO Group's legal position was empty. Jack Messman, the CEO of Novell, accused SCO of attempting an extortion plan against Linux users and distributors. Unix has a complex corporate history, with
1276-459: A draft press release concerning SCO's plans had been in the works for several weeks and had been quietly circulated to other companies in the industry. The O'Gara report, unconfirmed as it was, caused some amount of consternation in the Linux community. On January 22, 2003, creation of the SCOsource division of the company, to manage the licensing of the company's Unix-related intellectual property,
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#17328488103841392-629: A generic term such as system to help avoid the creation of a genericized trademark . Ray Noorda Raymond John "Ray" Noorda (19 June 1924 – 9 October 2006) was a U.S. computer businessman. He was CEO of Novell between 1982 and 1994. He also served as chairman of Novell until he was replaced in 1994. Noorda was born in Ogden , Utah , the third son of Dutch immigrants Bertus Noorda and Alida Margaretha van den Berg. He attended Weber State College in Ogden. During World War II , he served in
1508-522: A large community of value-added resellers that eventually became 15,000 strong and many of its sales of its SCO OpenServer product to small and medium-sized businesses went through those resellers. In 1995, SCO bought the System V Release 4 and UnixWare business from Novell (which had two years earlier acquired the AT&;T -offshoot Unix System Laboratories ) to improve its technology base. But beginning in
1624-455: A major adverse ruling in the SCO v. Novell case that rejected SCO's claim of ownership of Unix-related copyrights and undermined much of the rest of its legal position. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection soon after and attempted to continue operations. Its mobility and Unix software assets were sold off in 2011, to McBride and UnXis respectively. Renamed to The TSG Group,
1740-438: A million and a billion [dollars], right? I just wanted to know what real, tangible intellectual property value the company held." Shortly before the name change to SCO, Caldera went through its existing license agreements, found some that were not being collected upon, and came to arrangements with those licensees representing some $ 600,000 in annual revenue. In particular, from the start of his time as CEO, McBride had considered
1856-586: A new program for partners, called SCOx. A key feature of SCOx was a buyout option that allowed SCOx solution providers to sell their businesses back to SCO. McBride stated that the program would give partners a chance at "living the American dream". The company's financial hole was emphasized when it released its results for the fiscal year ending October 31, 2002 – it had lost $ 25 million on revenues of $ 64 million. The previously announced operating system releases began appearing, beginning with
1972-405: A new project of smaller scale. This new operating system was initially without organizational backing, and also without a name. The new operating system was a single-tasking system. In 1970, the group coined the name Unics for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service as a pun on Multics , which stood for Multiplexed Information and Computer Services . Brian Kernighan takes credit for
2088-458: A number of other respects, called LKP "the most impressive of UnixWare's capabilities". SCO OpenServer 5.0.7 was released in February 2003; the release emphasized enhanced hardware support, including new graphic, network and HBA device drivers, support for USB 2.0 , improved and updated UDI support, and support for several new Intel and Intel-compatible processors. The SCOx software framework
2204-507: A potential universal operating system, suitable for computers of all sizes. The Unix environment and the client–server program model were essential elements in the development of the Internet and the reshaping of computing as centered in networks rather than in individual computers. Both Unix and the C programming language were developed by AT&T and distributed to government and academic institutions, which led to both being ported to
2320-420: A reference directory layout for Unix-like operating systems; it has mainly been used in Linux. The Unix system is composed of several components that were originally packaged together. By including the development environment, libraries, documents and the portable, modifiable source code for all of these components, in addition to the kernel of an operating system, Unix was a self-contained software system. This
2436-498: A representation like Un*x , *NIX , or *N?X is used to indicate all operating systems similar to Unix. This comes from the use of the asterisk ( * ) and the question mark characters as wildcard indicators in many utilities. This notation is also used to describe other Unix-like systems that have not met the requirements for UNIX branding from the Open Group. The Open Group requests that UNIX always be used as an adjective followed by
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#17328488103842552-445: A set of cultural norms for developing software, norms which became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself; this has been termed the Unix philosophy . The TCP/IP networking protocols were quickly implemented on the Unix versions widely used on relatively inexpensive computers, which contributed to the Internet explosion of worldwide, real-time connectivity and formed
2668-439: A set of simple tools, each of which performs a limited, well-defined function. A unified and inode -based filesystem and an inter-process communication mechanism known as " pipes " serve as the main means of communication, and a shell scripting and command language (the Unix shell ) is used to combine the tools to perform complex workflows. In the early 1990s, AT&T sold its rights in Unix to Novell , which then sold
2784-474: A single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These concepts are collectively known as the " Unix philosophy ". Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike summarize this in The Unix Programming Environment as "the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves". By the early 1980s, users began seeing Unix as
2900-541: A single nine-track magnetic tape , earning its reputation as a portable system. The printed documentation, typeset from the online sources, was contained in two volumes. The names and filesystem locations of the Unix components have changed substantially across the history of the system. Nonetheless, the V7 implementation has the canonical early structure: The Unix system had a significant impact on other operating systems. It achieved its reputation by its interactivity, by providing
3016-446: A successful file sharing system for the newly introduced IBM-compatible PC . This network operating system was later called Novell NetWare . Under Noorda's watch, Novell acquired several companies and products with the goal of countering Microsoft 's rapid spread into new markets, including Digital Research , Unix System Laboratories , WordPerfect , and Borland 's Quattro Pro . Microsoft CEO Bill Gates claimed that Noorda had
3132-628: A technology and failed to convince Novell management to move forward with it. Caldera's early funding came from Ray Noorda , the former CEO of Novell, and the Utah Valley -based Canopy Group investment fund that Noorda started for high-technology firms. The company had been in the business of selling its Caldera OpenLinux product but had never been profitable. It attempted to make a combined business out of Linux and Unix but failed to make headway and had suffered continuing financial difficulties. By June 2002, after it had moved to nearby Lindon , its stock
3248-476: A technology-focused venture capital firm, made a $ 50 million private placement investment in SCO, to be used towards the company's legal costs and general product development efforts. In December 2003, SCO sent letters to 1,000 Linux customers that in essence accused them of making illegal use of SCO's intellectual property. Novell continued to insist that it owned the copyrights to Unix. While Novell no longer had
3364-556: A tremendous source of revenue for SCO. The potential for this happening was certainly beneficial to SCO's stock price, which during one three-week span in May 2003 tripled in value. Another counterattack came in August 2003, when Red Hat, Inc. v. SCO Group, Inc. was filed by the largest of the Linux distribution companies. The SCO Group received a major boost in October 2003 when BayStar Capital ,
3480-479: A uniform interface, but at the expense of occasionally requiring additional mechanisms such as ioctl and mode flags to access features of the hardware that did not fit the simple "stream of bytes" model. The Plan 9 operating system pushed this model even further and eliminated the need for additional mechanisms. Unix also popularized the hierarchical file system with arbitrarily nested subdirectories, originally introduced by Multics. Other common operating systems of
3596-594: A valiant warrior for the continuance of proprietary software , saying they were in "a huge raging battle around the globe", that the GNU General Public License that Linux was based on was "about destroying value", and saying that like Bond, they would be thrown into many battles but come out the victor in the end. Linux advocates had repeatedly asked SCO to enumerate and show the specific areas of code in Linux that SCO thought were infringing on Unix. An analyst for IDC said that if SCO were more forthcoming on
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3712-498: A versatile document preparation system, and an efficient file system featuring sophisticated access control, mountable and de-mountable volumes, and a unified treatment of peripherals as special files ." The latter permitted the Network Control Program (NCP) to be integrated within the Unix file system, treating network connections as special files that could be accessed through standard Unix I/O calls , which included
3828-459: A violation." The legal considerations involved were complex, and resolved around subtleties such as how the notion of derivative works should be applied. Furthermore, Novell's argument that it had never transferred copyrights to the Santa Cruz Operation placed a cloud over the SCO Group's legal campaign. Most, but not all, industry observers felt that SCO was unlikely to win. InfoWorld drily noted that Las Vegas bookmakers were not giving odds on
3944-548: A web services-based Application Substrate, featuring a combination of tools and APIs from Vultus's WebFace suite and from Ericom Software 's Host Publisher development framework. A year later, in September 2004, this idea materialized when the SCOx Web Services Substrate (WSS) was released for UnixWare 7.1.4. Its aim was to give existing SCO customers a way to "webify" their applications via Ericom's tool and then make
4060-536: A web-based application development environment with a set of browser-based user interface elements that provided a richer UI functionality without the need for Java applets or other plug-ins. Indeed, in putting together WebFace, Vultus was a pioneer in AJAX techniques before that term was even coined. The acquisition of Vultus resulted in a shift of emphasis in the company's web services initiative, with an announcement being made in August 2003 at SCO Forum that SCOx would now be
4176-402: A wider variety of machine families than any other operating system. The Unix operating system consists of many libraries and utilities along with the master control program, the kernel . The kernel provides services to start and stop programs, handles the file system and other common "low-level" tasks that most programs share, and schedules access to avoid conflicts when programs try to access
4292-525: The Apache Web Server framework, and improvements to the previously developed Linux Kernel Personality (LKP) for running Linux applications. In particular, the SCO Group stated that due to superior multiprocessor performance and reliability, Linux applications could run better on UnixWare via LKP than they could on native Linux itself, a stance that dated back to Santa Cruz Operation/Caldera International days. One review, that found UnixWare 7.1.3 lacking in
4408-490: The Bell System , AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley ( BSD ), Microsoft ( Xenix ), Sun Microsystems ( SunOS / Solaris ), HP / HPE ( HP-UX ), and IBM ( AIX ). Early versions of Unix ran on PDP-11 computers; Unix was commonly used on minicomputers and mainframes from
4524-580: The Canopy Group , which he had founded in 1992 through the Noorda Family Trust (NFT Ventures, Inc.). One of its holdings, Caldera , purchased the Unix assets in 1995 from the Santa Cruz Operation , which had acquired them from Novell. In 1996, it also acquired the Digital Research assets from Novell and immediately brought a lawsuit against Microsoft that largely duplicated the claims that
4640-477: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice had pursued in the early 1990s. The lawsuit was ultimately settled in 2000 with a $ 280 million payment to Caldera. Noorda received honorary doctorates from the University of Utah in 1994 and Weber State University in 1995. As a consequence of age and associated health issues ( Alzheimer's disease and heart disease ), Noorda did not participate in
4756-761: The GNU Compiler Collection (and the rest of the GNU toolchain ), the GNU C library and the GNU Core Utilities – have gone on to play central roles in other free Unix systems as well. Linux distributions , consisting of the Linux kernel and large collections of compatible software have become popular both with individual users and in business. Popular distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux , Fedora , SUSE Linux Enterprise , openSUSE , Debian , Ubuntu , Linux Mint , Slackware Linux , Arch Linux and Gentoo . A free derivative of BSD Unix, 386BSD ,
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4872-524: The SCO–Linux controversies . The SCO Group began in 2002 with a renaming of Caldera International , accompanied by McBride becoming CEO and a major change in business strategy and direction. The SCO brand was re-emphasized, and new releases of UnixWare and OpenServer came out. The company also attempted some initiatives in the e-commerce space with the SCOBiz and SCOx programs. In 2003, the SCO Group claimed that
4988-562: The Salt Lake Temple . Among the positions that Noorda held in the LDS Church were counselor in a branch presidency and counselor in a stake Sunday school presidency. In 1983, Noorda assembled the SuperSet team whose members included Drew Major , James Bills, Dale Niebaur and Kyle Powell. The team was originally assigned to create a CP/M disk sharing system, but instead came up with
5104-584: The U.S. Navy for two years as an electronics technician, working with radar systems. He graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in engineering from the University of Utah in 1949. Noorda worked for General Electric from graduation until 1971, after which he worked at a number of California companies. Noorda was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). He married Lewena "Tye" Taylor in 1950, and they were later sealed in
5220-578: The UNIX 98 or UNIX 03 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a substantial certification fee and annual trademark royalties to The Open Group. Systems that have been licensed to use the UNIX trademark include AIX , EulerOS , HP-UX , Inspur K-UX , IRIX , macOS , Solaris , Tru64 UNIX (formerly "Digital UNIX", or OSF/1 ), and z/OS . Notably, EulerOS and Inspur K-UX are Linux distributions certified as UNIX 03 compliant. Sometimes
5336-408: The 1970s onwards. It distinguished itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language , which allows Unix to operate on numerous platforms. Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the " Unix philosophy ". According to this philosophy, the operating system should provide
5452-514: The Harley-Davidson brand in the 1980s. Besides McBride, other company executives, including new senior vice president of technology Opinder Bawa, were heavily involved in the change of direction. The product name Caldera OpenLinux became "SCO Linux powered by UnitedLinux" and all other Caldera branded names were changed as well. In particular, the longstanding UnixWare name – which Caldera had changed to Open UNIX –
5568-475: The Open Group Base Specification. In 1999, in an effort towards compatibility, several Unix system vendors agreed on SVR4's Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) as the standard for binary and object code files. The common format allows substantial binary compatibility among different Unix systems operating on the same CPU architecture. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard was created to provide
5684-454: The OpenServer product was still selling: "What is it with the OpenServer phenomenon? We can't kill it. One customer last month bought $ 4 million in OpenServer licenses. The customers want to give us money for it. Why don't we just sell it?" As a historical comparison for his strategy of building back up the brand and being more responsive to customers, McBride used a model of the revival of
5800-495: The SCO Group a number of steps removed from the Bell Labs origins of the operating system. Novell and the SCO Group quickly fell into a vocal dispute that revolved around the interpretation of the 1995 asset-transfer agreement between them. That agreement had been uncertain enough at the time that an amendment to it had to be signed in October 1996, and even that was insufficiently unambiguous to now preclude an extended battle between
5916-616: The SCO Group-versus-the-open-source-world dogfight is no exception. Rhetoric runs high. From the open-source advocates, it's "you're stifling free thought in the name of greed." SCO allies counter with "you're attacking the core values of capitalism." —LinuxInsider, 2004. Unix operating system Early research and development: Merging the networks and creating the Internet: Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to
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#17328488103846032-450: The Santa Cruz Operation for its part in the failed Project Monterey of the late 1990s. Overall, SCO maintained that Linux could not have caught up to "Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality" so quickly without coordination by a large company, and that this coordination could have happened through the taking of "methods or concepts" even if not a single line of Unix code appeared within Linux. The SCO v. IBM case
6148-556: The SuSE product was aimed at the enterprise segment and Conectiva and Turbolinux were intended mostly for the South American and Asian markets. The common United Linux base (which mostly came from a SuSE code origin), and the promise of common certification across all four products, attracted some support from hardware and software vendors such as IBM, HP, Computer Associates, and SAP. An assessment of SCO Linux 4 in eWeek found that it
6264-480: The UNIX trademark to The Open Group , an industry consortium founded in 1996. The Open Group allows the use of the mark for certified operating systems that comply with the Single UNIX Specification (SUS). Unix-like operating systems have been relevant since the 1990s which function similarly to Unix: popular examples are GNU (including Linux ), FreeBSD and macOS . Unix was originally meant to be
6380-616: The added benefit of closing all connections on program exit, should the user neglect to do so. In order "to minimize the amount of code added to the basic Unix kernel ", much of the NCP code ran in a swappable user process, running only when needed. In October 1993, Novell , the company that owned the rights to the Unix System V source at the time, transferred the trademarks of Unix to the X/Open Company (now The Open Group ), and in 1995 sold
6496-465: The basis for a widely implemented operating system interface standard (POSIX, see above). The C programming language soon spread beyond Unix, and is now ubiquitous in systems and applications programming. Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix (and programs that ran on it) established
6612-435: The basis for implementations on many other platforms. The Unix policy of extensive on-line documentation and (for many years) ready access to all system source code raised programmer expectations, and contributed to the launch of the free software movement in 1983. In 1983, Richard Stallman announced the GNU (short for "GNU's Not Unix") project, an ambitious effort to create a free software Unix-like system—"free" in
6728-408: The battle, but the three analysts it polled gave odds of 6-to-4 against SCO, 200-to-1 against SCO, and 6-to-4 for SCO. In any case, while Linux customers may not have been happy about the concerns and threats that the SCO Group was raising, it was unclear whether that was slowing their adoption of Linux; some business media reports indicated that it was, or that it might, while others indicated that it
6844-535: The code in question pointed to SGI . At this time it was also revealed that the code had already been removed from the Linux kernel, because it duplicated already existing functions. By early 2004, the small amount of evidence that had been presented publicly was viewed as inconclusive by lawyers and software professionals who were not partisan to either side. As Businessweek wrote, "While there are similarities between some code that SCO claims it owns and material in Linux, it's not clear to software experts that there's
6960-492: The command interpreter an ordinary user-level program, with additional commands provided as separate programs, was another Multics innovation popularized by Unix. The Unix shell used the same language for interactive commands as for scripting ( shell scripts – there was no separate job control language like IBM's JCL ). Since the shell and OS commands were "just another program", the user could choose (or even write) their own shell. New commands could be added without changing
7076-560: The company converted to Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2012. A portion of the SCO v. IBM case continued on until 2021, when a settlement was reached for a tiny fraction of what SCO had initially sued for. The Santa Cruz Operation had been an American software company, founded in 1979 in Santa Cruz, California , that found success during the 1980s and 1990s selling Unix -based operating system products for Intel x86 -based server systems. SCO built
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#17328488103847192-399: The company's annual Forum conference – relocated from Santa Cruz to Las Vegas – that Caldera International was changing its name to The SCO Group. He did this via a multimedia display in which an image of Caldera was shattered and replaced by The SCO Group's logo, which was a slightly more stylized version of the old Santa Cruz Operation logo. The attendees at
7308-655: The company's second fiscal quarter, which led to the SCO Group turning a profit for the first time in its Caldera-origined history. In July 2003, the SCO Group announced it had acquired Vultus Inc. for an unspecified price. Vultus was a start-up company, also based in Lindon, Utah, and the Lindon-based Canopy Group was a major investor in Vultus just as it was the SCO Group. Vultus made the WebFace Solution Suite,
7424-467: The conference, most of whom were veteran SCO partners and resellers, responded to the announcement with enthusiastic applause. McBride announced, "SCO is back from the dead", and a story in The Register began "SCO lives again". As part of this, the company adopted SCOX as its trading symbol. The change back to a SCO-based name reflected recognition of the reality that almost all of the company's revenue
7540-475: The core of the Mac OS X operating system, later renamed macOS . Unix-like operating systems are widely used in modern servers , workstations , and mobile devices . In the late 1980s, an open operating system standardization effort now known as POSIX provided a common baseline for all operating systems; IEEE based POSIX around the common structure of the major competing variants of the Unix system, publishing
7656-596: The courts, but McBride professed to be nonplussed: "If it takes a couple of years, we're geared to do that." For his part, Boies said he liked David versus Goliath struggles, and his firm would see a substantial gain out of any victory. In mid-May 2003, SCO sent a letter to some 1,500 companies, cautioning them that using Linux could put them in legal jeopardy. As part of this, SCO proclaimed that Linux contained substantial amounts of Unix System V source code and that, as such, "We believe that Linux is, in material part, an unauthorized derivative of Unix." As CNET wrote,
7772-469: The details, "the whole discussion might take a different tone." However, SCO was reluctant to show any such code in public, preferring to keep it secret — a strategy that was commonly adopted in intellectual property litigation. However, during the company's Forum conference, SCO did publicly show several alleged examples of illegal copying of copyright code in Linux. Until that time, these examples had only been available to people who signed
7888-546: The era had ways to divide a storage device into multiple directories or sections, but they had a fixed number of levels, often only one level. Several major proprietary operating systems eventually added recursive subdirectory capabilities also patterned after Multics. DEC's RSX-11M 's "group, user" hierarchy evolved into OpenVMS directories, CP/M 's volumes evolved into MS-DOS 2.0+ subdirectories, and HP's MPE group.account hierarchy and IBM's SSP and OS/400 library systems were folded into broader POSIX file systems. Making
8004-649: The first POSIX standard in 1988. In the early 1990s, a separate but very similar effort was started by an industry consortium, the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative, which eventually became the Single UNIX Specification (SUS) administered by The Open Group . Starting in 1998, the Open Group and IEEE started the Austin Group , to provide a common definition of POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification, which, by 2008, had become
8120-570: The functionality of those applications available via web services. However, as McBride later conceded, the SCOx WSS failed to gain an audience, and it was largely gone from company mention a year later. In the keynote address at its SCO Forum conference in August 2003, held at the MGM Grand Las Vegas , the SCO Group made an expansive defense of its legal actions. Framed by licensed-from-MGM James Bond music and film clips , McBride portrayed SCO as
8236-544: The head of Caldera International, he became interested in what intellectual property the company possessed. He had been a manager at Novell in 1993 when Novell had bought Unix System Laboratories, and all of its Unix assets, including copyrights, trademarks, and licensing contracts, for $ 335 million. Novell had subsequently sold its Unix business to the Santa Cruz Operation, which had then sold it to Caldera. So in 2002, McBride said he had thought: "In theory, there should be some value to that property – somewhere between
8352-420: The idea, but adds that "no one can remember" the origin of the final spelling Unix . Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Peter G. Neumann also credit Kernighan. The operating system was originally written in assembly language , but in 1973, Version 4 Unix was rewritten in C . Version 4 Unix, however, still had much PDP-11 specific code, and was not suitable for porting. The first port to another platform
8468-406: The increasingly popular free Linux operating system contained substantial amounts of Unix code that IBM had improperly put there. The SCOsource division was created to monetize the company's intellectual property by selling Unix license rights to use Linux. The SCO v. IBM lawsuit was filed, asking for billion-dollar damages and setting off one of the top technology battles in the history of
8584-563: The industry for leading the U.S. federal government's successful prosecution of Microsoft in United States v. Microsoft Corp. ; as McBride subsequently said: "We went for the biggest gun we could find." News of the SCO Group's intent to take action regarding Linux first broke on January 10, 2003, in a column by technology reporter Maureen O'Gara of Linuxgram that appeared in Client Server News and Linux Business Week . She wrote that
8700-484: The industry. By a year later, four additional lawsuits had been filed involving the company. Reaction to SCO's actions from the free and open-source software community was intensely negative, and the general IT industry was not enamored of the actions either. SCO soon became, as Businessweek headlined, "The Most Hated Company in Tech". SCO Group stock rose rapidly during 2003, but then SCOsource revenue became erratic and
8816-476: The late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix ( BSD and System V ) by commercial startups, which in turn led to Unix fragmenting into multiple, similar — but often slightly and mutually incompatible — systems including DYNIX , HP-UX , SunOS / Solaris , AIX , and Xenix . In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4 ( SVR4 ), which
8932-484: The late 1990s, SCO faced increasingly severe competitive pressure, on one side from Microsoft's Windows NT and its successors and on the other side from the free and open source Linux . In 2001, the Santa Cruz Operation sold its rights to Unix and its SCO OpenServer and UnixWare products to Caldera International . Caldera, based in Orem, Utah , was founded in 1994 by several former Novell employees who saw promise in Linux as
9048-448: The legal validity of the GPL license were to be called into question. Conversely, a clear SCO loss would clarify any intellectual property concerns related to Linux, make corporate IT managers feel more relaxed about adopting Linux as a solution, and potentially bolster corporate enthusiasm for the open source movement as a whole. There's nothing like a good legal battle to whip up passions, and
9164-408: The licensing of our intellectual property"; this effort was provisionally called SCO Tech. Senior vice president Chris Sontag was put in charge of it. By the end of 2002, McBride and SCO had sought out the services of David Boies of the law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner as part of an effort to litigate against what it saw was unrightful use of its intellectual property. Boies had gained fame in
9280-428: The modern Internet: Examples of Internet services: Unix ( / ˈ j uː n ɪ k s / , YOO -niks ; trademarked as UNIX ) is a family of multitasking , multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie , and others. Initially intended for use inside
9396-428: The modular design of the Unix model, sharing components is relatively common: most or all Unix and Unix-like systems include at least some BSD code, while some include GNU utilities in their distributions. Linux and BSD Unix are increasingly filling market needs traditionally served by proprietary Unix operating systems, expanding into new markets such as the consumer desktop , mobile devices and embedded devices . In
9512-443: The more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers. In the same interview, he states that he views both Unix and Linux as "the continuation of ideas that were started by Ken and me and many others, many years ago". OpenSolaris was the free software counterpart to Solaris developed by Sun Microsystems , which included a CDDL -licensed kernel and a primarily GNU userland. However, Oracle discontinued
9628-642: The move "dramatically broaden[ed]" the scope of the company's legal actions. At the same time, SCO announced it would stop selling its own SCO Linux product. A casualty of this stance was SCO's participation in the United Linux effort, and in turn United Linux itself. While the formal announcement that United Linux had ended did not come until January 2004, in reality the project stopped doing any tangible work soon after SCO filed its lawsuit against IBM. A few days later, Microsoft – which had long expressed disdain for Linux – said that it
9744-501: The new SCOsource division, telling investors on a February 26 earnings call that he expected it to bring in $ 10 million alone in the second fiscal quarter. On March 6, 2003, SCO filed suit against IBM, claiming that the computer giant had misappropriated trade secrets by transferring portions of its Unix-based AIX operating system into Linux, and asked for at least $ 1 billion in damages. The complaint also alleged breach of contract and tortious interference by IBM against
9860-500: The original version of Unix – the entire system was configured using textual shell command scripts. The common denominator in the I/O system was the byte – unlike "record-based" file systems . The focus on text for representing nearly everything made Unix pipes especially useful and encouraged the development of simple, general tools that could easily be combined to perform more complicated ad hoc tasks. The focus on text and bytes made
9976-521: The possibility of claiming ownership of some of the code within Linux. Outgoing Caldera CEO Ransom Love had told him: "Don't do it. You don't want to take on the entire Linux community." During the August 2002 name change announcement, Bawa stated: "We own the source to UNIX; it's that simple. If we own the source, we are entitled to collect the agreed license fees." But at the time, McBride said he had no intention of taking on Linux. By October 2002, McBride had created an internal organization "to formalize
10092-531: The project upon their acquisition of Sun, which prompted a group of former Sun employees and members of the OpenSolaris community to fork OpenSolaris into the illumos kernel. As of 2014, illumos remains the only active, open-source System V derivative. In May 1975, RFC 681 described the development of Network Unix by the Center for Advanced Computation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign . The Unix system
10208-575: The related business operations to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). Whether Novell also sold the copyrights to the actual software was the subject of a federal lawsuit in 2006, SCO v. Novell , which Novell won. The case was appealed, but on August 30, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the trial decisions, closing the case. Unix vendor SCO Group Inc. accused Novell of slander of title . The present owner of
10324-472: The same resource or device simultaneously. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the distinction of kernel space from user space , the latter being a lower priority realm where most application programs operate. The origins of Unix date back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Bell Labs , and General Electric were developing Multics ,
10440-452: The sense that everyone who received a copy would be free to use, study, modify, and redistribute it. The GNU project's own kernel development project, GNU Hurd , had not yet produced a working kernel, but in 1991 Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel as free software under the GNU General Public License . In addition to their use in the GNU operating system, many GNU packages – such as
10556-427: The shell itself. Unix's innovative command-line syntax for creating modular chains of producer-consumer processes ( pipelines ) made a powerful programming paradigm ( coroutines ) widely available. Many later command-line interpreters have been inspired by the Unix shell. A fundamental simplifying assumption of Unix was its focus on newline - delimited text for nearly all file formats. There were no "binary" editors in
10672-654: The software at a nominal fee for educational use, by running on inexpensive hardware, and by being easy to adapt and move to different machines. Unix was originally written in assembly language , but was soon rewritten in C , a high-level programming language . Although this followed the lead of CTSS , Multics and Burroughs MCP , it was Unix that popularized the idea. Unix had a drastically simplified file model compared to many contemporary operating systems: treating all kinds of files as simple byte arrays. The file system hierarchy contained machine services and devices (such as printers , terminals , or disk drives ), providing
10788-550: The stock began a long fall. Despite the industry's attention to the lawsuits, SCO continued to maintain a product focus as well, putting out a major new release of OpenServer that incorporated the UnixWare kernel inside it. SCO also made a major push in the burgeoning smartphones space, launching the Me Inc. platform for mobility services. But despite these actions, the company steadily lost money and shrank in size. In 2007, SCO suffered
10904-418: The system far more scalable and portable than other systems. Over time, text-based applications have also proven popular in application areas, such as printing languages ( PostScript , ODF ), and at the application layer of the Internet protocols , e.g., FTP , SMTP , HTTP , SOAP , and SIP . Unix popularized a syntax for regular expressions that found widespread use. The Unix programming interface became
11020-459: The trademark UNIX is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX" (others are called " Unix-like "). By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear
11136-429: The two companies would develop a SOAP - and XML -based web services interface to enable Vista.com e-commerce front-ends to communicate with existing back-end SCO-based applications. Industry analysts were somewhat skeptical of the chances for SCOBiz succeeding, as the market was already crowded with application service provider offerings and the dot-com bubble had already burst by that point. Lastly, SCO announced
11252-438: The two companies. In July 2003, SCO began offering UnixWare licenses for commercial Linux users, stating that "SCO will hold [as] harmless [any] commercial Linux customers that purchase a UnixWare license against any past copyright violations, and for any future use of Linux in a run-only, binary format." The server-based licenses were priced at $ 699 per machine, and if they were to become mandatory for Linux users, would represent
11368-409: Was SCOBiz e-commerce integration, although other uses were possible as well. The planned SCOx architecture overall was composed of layers for e-business services, web services, SSL-based security, a mySCO reseller portal, hosting services, and a software development kit. But by then, these software releases and e-commerce initiatives had become overshadowed by legal actions. As soon as McBride became
11484-527: Was a capable product, although the Webmin configuration tool was seen as limited when compared to YaST , SuSE's own operating system configuration tool. In terms of service and support, SCO pledged to field a set of escalation engineers that would only be handling SCO Linux issues. The new Unix operating system releases then came out. UnixWare 7.1.3 was released in December 2002, which featured improved Java support,
11600-531: Was a port of Version 6, made four years later (1977) at the University of Wollongong for the Interdata 7/32 , followed by a Bell Labs port of Version 7 to the Interdata 8/32 during 1977 and 1978. Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are collectively referred to as Research Unix . In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to Donald B. Gillies at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) Department of Computer Science. During
11716-414: Was acquiring a Unix license from SCO, in order to ensure interoperability with its own products and to ward off any questions about rights. The action was a boon to SCO, which to this point had received little support in the industry for its licensing initiative. Another major computer company, Sun Microsystems , bought an additional level of Unix licensing from SCO to add to what it had originally obtained
11832-555: Was announced in April 2003; its aim was to enable the SCO developer and reseller community to be able to connect web services and web-based presentation layers to the over 4,000 different applications that ran small and midsize businesses and branch offices. The web services aspect of SCOx included bundled SOAP/XML support for the Java, C, C++, PHP, and Perl languages. A primary target of the SCOx framework
11948-406: Was called SCO System V for Linux, which was a set of shared libraries intended to allow SCO Unix programs to be run legally on Linux without a user needing to license all of SCO OpenServer or UnixWare as had theretofore been necessary. The company continued to lose money, on revenues of $ 13.5 million in the first fiscal quarter of 2003, but McBride was enthusiastic about the prospects for
12064-556: Was coming from Unix, not Linux, products. For instance, McDonald's had recently expanded its usage of OpenServer from 4,000 to 10,000 stores; indeed, both OpenServer and UnixWare were strong in the replicated sites business. Furthermore the SCO brand was better known than the Caldera one, especially in Europe, and SCO's large, existing reseller and partner channel was resistant to switching to Caldera's product priorities. McBride emphasized that
12180-499: Was facing a second delisting notice from NASDAQ and the company had less than four months' cash for operations. As Wired magazine later wrote, the company "faced a nearly hopeless situation". On June 27, 2002, Caldera International had a change in management, with Darl McBride , formerly an executive with Novell , FranklinCovey , and several start-ups, taking over as CEO from Caldera co-founder Ransom Love. Change under McBride happened quickly. On August 26, 2002, he announced at
12296-415: Was met by criticism; as Computerworld later sarcastically wrote: "Faced with a skeptical customer base, SCO did what any good business would do to get new customers: sue them for money." In any case, the stage was set for the next several years' worth of court filings, depositions, hearings, interim rulings, and so on. The SCOsource division got off to a quick start, bringing in $ 8.8 million during
12412-474: Was not. The stakes were high in the battle the SCO Group had started, involving the future of Unix, Linux, and open source software in general. If SCO were to win its legal battles, the results could be extremely disruptive to the IT industry, especially if SCO's notion of derivative works were to be construed broadly by the courts. Furthermore a SCO victory would be devastating to the open source movement, especially if
12528-566: Was officially announced, as was the hiring of Boies to investigate and oversee legal protection of that property. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Linux users had generally assumed that Linux was created independently of Unix proprietary code, and Linux advocates were immediately concerned that SCO was going to ask large companies using Linux to pay SCO licensing fees to avoid a lawsuit. The first announced license program within SCOsource
12644-402: Was one of the key reasons it emerged as an important teaching and learning tool and has had a broad influence. See § Impact , below. The inclusion of these components did not make the system large – the original V7 UNIX distribution, consisting of copies of all of the compiled binaries plus all of the source code and documentation occupied less than 10 MB and arrived on
12760-510: Was released in 1992 and led to the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects. With the 1994 settlement of a lawsuit brought against the University of California and Berkeley Software Design Inc. ( USL v. BSDi ) by Unix System Laboratories , it was clarified that Berkeley had the right to distribute BSD Unix for free if it so desired. Since then, BSD Unix has been developed in several different product branches, including OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD . Because of
12876-435: Was restored, such that what had been called Open UNIX 8 was now named in proper sequence as UnixWare 7.1.2. Announcements were made that a new OpenServer release, 5.0.7, and a new UnixWare release, 7.1.3, would appear at the end of the year or beginning of the next. Moreover, through a new program called SCO Update, more frequent updates of capabilities were promised beyond that. Caldera's Volution Messaging Server product
12992-650: Was retained and renamed SCOoffice Server, but the other Caldera Volution products were split off under the names Volution Technologies, Center 7, and finally Vintela. In addition to reviving SCO's longtime operating system products, the SCO Group also announced a new venture, SCOBiz. SCOBiz was a collaboration with the Bellingham, Washington -based firm Vista.com, founded in 1999 by John Wall, in which SCO partners could sell Vista.com's online, web-based e-commerce development and hosting service targeted at small and medium-sized businesses. More importantly, as part of SCOBiz,
13108-516: Was said to "present several interesting capabilities as an ARPANET mini-host". At the time, Unix required a license from Bell Telephone Laboratories that cost US$ 20,000 for non-university institutions, while universities could obtain a license for a nominal fee of $ 150. It was noted that Bell was "open to suggestions" for an ARPANET-wide license. The RFC specifically mentions that Unix "offers powerful local processing facilities in terms of user programs, several compilers , an editor based on QED ,
13224-404: Was subsequently adopted by many commercial Unix vendors. In the 1990s, Unix and Unix-like systems grew in popularity and became the operating system of choice for over 90% of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers , as BSD and Linux distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers. In 2000, Apple released Darwin , also a Unix system, which became
13340-410: Was underway. Lawsuits against two Linux end users, SCO Group, Inc. v. DaimlerChrysler Corp. and SCO v. AutoZone were filed on March 3, 2004. The first alleged that Daimler Chrysler had violated the terms of the Unix software agreement it had with SCO, while the second claimed that AutoZone was running versions of Linux that contained unlicensed source code from SCO. As a strategy this move
13456-448: Was underway; it would come to be considered one of the top technology battles of all time. Many industry analysts were not impressed by the lawsuit, with one saying: "It's a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company [...] This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can't get by winning in the marketplace." Other analysts pointed to the deep legal resources IBM had for any protracted fight in
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