SCO Group

The TSG Group, previously known as SCO Group and formerly as Caldera Systems and Caldera International, is a corporation that originally associated with Linux and the free software movement, developed Linux distributions for servers and workstations. After acquiring some rights to UNIX, SCO UNIX (now SCO OpenServer) and UnixWare, he filed a lawsuit against IBM in 2003, alleging that IBM had inserted code belonging to SCO Group into the Linux kernel.

History

Utah-based Caldera Systems was founded in 1998 by Ransom Love and received seed funding from Ray Noorda. Its main product was Caldera Linux, a Linux distribution aimed at business clients and containing some non-free plugins.

In 1993 Novell bought USL (Unix Systems Laboratories). In 1995 Novell and SCO agree to an exchange of shares: Novell assigns SCO 100% of USL and in exchange, SCO grants Novell 17% of its shares, with which Novell is part of the Board of Directors of SCO Inc This meant for SCO the acquisition of all rights to the UNIX sources (original property of USL, a subsidiary of Bell Labs, where UNIX was created).

In 2002, Caldera acquired several properties from the Santa Cruz Operation, including SCO UNIX (now called SCO OpenServer) and UnixWare, non-free operating systems for PCs that were expected to compete directly with Linux. Precisely SCO Openserver and UnixWare are the main products offered until 2011 by The SCO Group.

In 2002, Caldera joined SuSE Linux, Turbolinux and Conectiva to form United Linux, in an attempt to standardize Linux distributions. Later that same year, Ransom Love left the company. Caldera's management admitted that most of its profits came from SCO UNIX, so the company's name was changed to SCO Group (despite the name, the current company is not associated with the Santa Cruz Operation).

The company has been part of the Canopy group until one of the directors, Ralf Yarro, at the same time CEO of the Canopy Group, was ousted by the Noorda family under mysterious circumstances, and has since become an independent company.

Bankruptcy

On September 14, 2007, due to legal setbacks suffered by the company, SCO filed for protection invoking the terms of Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.

On October 25, 2007, SCO (the former king of PC Unix) receives a $36 million offer from JGD Management for its business and intellectual property [1]. But it was finally rejected on November 20 [2]

Another deal was proposed, this time with SNCP in February 2008 [3][4] but was also rejected two months later [5]

In August 2012, the company filed for Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy law, that is, bankruptcy dissolution.

SCO Disputes on Linux

In January 2003, SCO retained attorney David Boies, announcing that they would investigate copyright infringement. On March 7, SCO chief executive Darl McBride announced that they would sue IBM for their contributions to Linux code, alleging that IBM, which had purchased the sources for their version (AIX), delivered TCP/IP source code originally. UNIX for Linux TCP/IP. As a result of the trial, SuSE Linux has publicly stated that it will re-evaluate its ties with SCO.

In May 2003, SCO Group said it sent letters to 1,500 of the world's largest corporations, including Fortune 500 companies, alleging that by using Linux, they might be infringing their intellectual property rights to the original code of UNIX. As a result, SCO has been sued for defamation by several companies, including IBM, the German organization LinuxTag, SuSE, and Red Hat.

On August 18, 2007, the judgment of this lawsuit, which had been active since 2003, was finally announced. Judge Dale A. Kimball finally concluded:

• That the agreement SCO had with Novell the only right granted SCO was to sell Unix licenses to third parties.
• SCO has to pay Novell 95% of the amount of these sales, which was mainly USD 16 million and USD 10 million from Sun.

Products

• SCO OpenServer
• UnixWare
• Smallfoot
• SCOx Web Services Substrate
• WebFace, a development environment for Internet applications based on enriched user interface browser.
• SCOoffice Server
• Me, Inc