Who stole SCO's lollipop?
Published: 15 May 2003 13:44 BST
IBM's response was to drop plans to offer binary compatibility for applications across UnixWare and future versions of IBM's 64-bit AIX operating system. IBM executives could barely be brought to acknowledge that any such entity as Project Monterey had ever existed. At the time, the best I could get out of IBM's director of Unix strategy Deepak Advanti was that where IBM would have talked about UnixWare in 1999, by mid-2000 it would talk about Linux.
IBM's strategy had switched dramatically. The company's Unix strategy now had three key elements -- none of which included UnixWare. It was to push AIX as an open enterprise-class strategic operating system, push Linux as the pervasive high volume operating system, and create a common application programming interface across Linux and AIX. The result was that work such as that to transfer AIX technology such as the IP stack into UnixWare stumbled.
Publicly, SCO/Caldera put on a brave face, saying that the decision to abandon binary compatibility was sound because companies moving to 64-bit computing would want to run applications natively, because they would run faster and be more reliable.
And at IBM, the public message was that AIX 5L (the L stood for Linux) was the finished Project Monterey. Everybody who had been eagerly awaiting the Project Monterey operating systems accused IBM of rewriting history. Unix users flooded online forums to discuss the controversy. Many said they were unhappy over IBM's apparent attempt to whitewash the fact that Project Monterey had changed course. Some likened the debacle to OS/2, a project on which IBM never officially pulled the plug, but which was simply left to wither in solitude, with no major upgrades.
But in pulling the rug out from under UnixWare, it seems that IBM had not bargained for the fact that SCO/Caldera could be just as calculated.
When the new SCO Group was created by Caldera's purchase of the old SCO's operating system division, it was bankrolled by an investment firm called the Canopy Group to the tune of $18m. The Canopy Group is controlled by Ray Noorda, who used to be Novell chief executive in the days before Novell sold UnixWare to SCO. Indeed, SCO/Caldera's relationship with UnixWare goes way back beyond 2000; Caldera co-founders Ransom Love (who last year stood aside for new chief executive Darl McBride at SCO) and Bryan Sparks also used to work at Novell when it still owned UnixWare. So there are plenty of people at the new SCO who have good reason to smart over the treatment of UnixWare.
And now, it seems, SCO is looking for payback.
So is SCO's decision to send in the lawyers a valid and sensible business decision to realise previously undeveloped (from SCO's point of view) assets a slightly bitter retribution to settle old scores and defend the honour of UnixWare, or a petulant reprisal at the playground bully?
Judging from the postings that have appeared online recently, it would appear that SCO has about the same grasp of reality as did the infamous Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, in the closing days of the war in Iraq. Indeed, pity SCO's PR boss who has to explain why that code distributed by SCO under the GPL licence contained code that SCO has the rights to, and they'd like it back now, please. It really is hard to see this as anything other than a playground spat. While the lawyers go fight it out, the rest of us should carry on as usual, buying, using and developing Linux.
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
45 out of 78 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
