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Who stole SCO's lollipop?

Matt Loney ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 15 May 2003 13:44 BST

That lollipop, Project Monterey, was all the rage among the marketing departments in the old SCO, in IBM and in Sequent (before it was bought by IBM) just four years ago as they began repositioning their Unix offerings to reflect their convergence on the single version of 64-bit Unix.

Project Monterey, we were told, would provide full compatibility with SCO's UnixWare products, and at the same time IBM was to release DB2 for the platform. SCO would also supplement its UnixWare 7 products with initial AIX libraries and headers for application support, as well as AIX system management enhancements.

Applications that were currently running on UnixWare on IA-32 platforms would be binary and source-compatible on IA-64-based systems, said the companies, and should compile with minimal rewrites for the IA-64 version of Monterey, which would be more heavily based on IBM's AIX operating system.

SCO and Sequent were both very important companies to IBM back then. Sequent for its big 64-way Intel servers and the associated technology, which IBM had it eye on as Intel continued to make inroads into traditional RISC strongholds, and SCO for its developer base, which IBM needed to help bolster AIX in advance of 64-bit Windows.

That was 1999. Skip forward just one year, to September 2000, and the tech world was a very different place. The old SCO, headed by Michaels, announced that its server and professional services divisions would be sold to Linux distributor Caldera, but something much more significant had happened: Linux had 'arrived'.

Whether the first move spooked IBM is doubtful -- IBM already had a partnership with Caldera to develop a common 'personality' across Linux and Unix operating systems. But it was the coming of age of Linux, which manifested itself in the support of Linux by all the big (one notable exception aside) application vendors, together with what IBM interpreted at the time as a mass desertion of developers from Unix (and UnixWare in particular) to Linux. In addition to that, it seemed that barely a single graduate from a single computing course in any university you cared to look at was even allowed out of the doors until they had done their bit on the Linux kernel.