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DistributionsNews and Editorials Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar] Four years ago, Caldera produced one of the best Linux distributions of all times, gained a respectable market share and established vast international presence. Last week, the company suspended its Linux-related activities. What went wrong? Caldera, Inc. was established in 1994 by two former Novell employees Ransom Love and Bryan Sparks. Much of the funding came from Ray Noorda, Novell's former President and CEO and his Canopy Group Investment Company, which he founded in 1995. In February 1996, Caldera released its first Linux product under the name of Caldera Network Desktop 1.0. New releases followed at regular intervals, but it wasn't until Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 in August 1999 that the company made a substantial impact on the Linux market by introducing Lizard. Caldera's Lizard was the first graphical installer ever deployed by a Linux distribution. The OpenLinux 2.3 and especially OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4 releases were well received by Linux fans. "Caldera users truly loved Caldera. The Caldera community was strong, close, and laid-back. The Caldera user mailing list was a true delight." wrote Dennis Powell nostalgically in a recent commentary at Linux and Main. Caldera's KDE-centric products with no GTK/Gnome libraries were remarkably stable and bug-free, a fact that produced an unusually high percentage of entertaining, off-topic discussions on the mailing lists. In the following months, Caldera expanded its presence to 82 countries, introduced Linux training courses and tirelessly attended all major Linux shows and exhibitions around the world. It all seemed like a huge success story. Behind the scenes, however, things did not look nearly as rosy. Sales of boxed products were slow, which prompted the company to withdraw from the retail market in 2001. But the biggest shock came in June of that year when Caldera announced an unprecedented decision to introduce per-seat licensing for their upcoming OpenLinux Workstation and Server 3.1. There was a loud stir on the Caldera mailing list. Even louder was the heated exchange of words between GNU's Richard Stallman, who called Caldera "a parasitic company" and Ransom Love, who claimed that "the open source movement has no clue about marketing". Despite the wide-spread criticism, Caldera pressed ahead with the new license, although, in what looked like a sudden change of mind, it quietly released the distribution as a free download for non-commercial purposes. Nevertheless, the damage was done. The company made the headlines twice in 2002. In May, Caldera was behind the initiative to launch United Linux, a consortium of four companies (the other three were SuSE, Turbolinux and Conectiva) to create an enterprise class distribution, while sharing a unified code base and pooling some of their resources. Despite repeated claims that the consortium is not anti-Red Hat, many analysts felt otherwise. The final version of United Linux 1.0 was released in November 2002. By that time, there was no more Caldera as the company renamed itself to 'The SCO Group'. "Caldera to change its name to SCO, reemphasizing its dedication to Linux, and capturing brand recognition of the SCO name", proudly proclaimed the press release. Thus, Caldera's last Linux product became known as SCO Linux 4.0 powered by UnitedLinux. It carried a per seat license and it was only available from SCO's online store for between $600 and $2,200 depending on support requirements (the $600 edition came with no support whatsoever). We don't know how many boxes SCO sold, but one thing is for certain - SCO Linux made very little dent in Red Hat's market dominance. Richard Stallman made himself heard once again: "Licensing per seat perverts the GNU/Linux system into something that respects your freedom as much as Windows." The Caldera/SCO mailing list became the prime example of the general disillusionment with the company practices. The once popular and lively discussion forum degenerated into angry exchanges, accusations and demands for clear statements about the company's future plans. As these were not forthcoming, many left the list with a widely varying degree of civilized behavior. But of course, all the controversial decisions the company made in the past were nothing compared to the current onslaught against Linux. "Linux is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX and legal liability that may arise from the Linux development process may also rest with the end user." "For the reasons explained above," continues the letter sent to SCO customers on May 14, 2003, "we have announced the suspension of our own Linux-related activities". The intentions were made very clear -- or where they? Back to the SCO mailing list and another quote from a message by a SCO support representative on the very next day (please note that at the time of writing, SCO's online mailing list archives have yet to be updated to show this message): "SCO will continue to honour and renew support agreements and will continue to provide maintenance in the form of security fixes for [OpenLinux 3.1.1 and SCO Linux 4.0]. SCO has no plans to retire SCO Linux at this time." Maybe some lawyers can conclude that the meanings of the two statements are really equivalent, but for the rest of us, they are just another sign of confusion from a company whose honesty and reliability would make the former Iraqi information minister look like an innocent child. This is a sad, sad end of a great distribution and quite possibly the company, whose greed and desperation, rather than solid products, have become the dominant business model. What's the opposite of "rest in peace, Caldera/SCO Linux"?
Linux Audio Workstation (LAW)The LAW distribution, is not a complete Linux distribution. It is a collection of documents and installation scripts that can be used to turn your existing system into an audio workstation. Version 1.0 uses Red Hat Linux 7.2 (Valhalla) as a base system. The next version will use Debian as the base. Of course LAW scripts will probably work well on other distributions with little or no modification.
Distribution News Debian GNU/LinuxThe Debian Weekly News for May 20, 2003 is available. This week's topics include GCC 3.2 & 3.3; Libranet 2.8; Debian Leader Delegations; Debian MIA Check; and much more.There will be a key-signing party at Debconf 3. A new mailing list debian-multimedia mailing list has been created for discussion about the development of applications that produce multimedia content, handling multimedia data, supporting multimedia hardware etc.
Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 20The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for May 19, 2003 is out. Gentoo announces the creation of Gentoo Games. Read more below about how Gentoo plans to advance Linux gaming.
"The Complete FreeBSD" Released by O'ReillyO'Reilly has released "The Complete FreeBSD", a practical guidebook that explains how to get a computer up and running with the FreeBSD operating system and how to turn it into a functional and secure server.
Mandrake LinuxMandrakeSoft reports that the gnome-pilot package, which provides PDA support for GNOME had an error where it would not work the Palm Tungest T. This update fixes that issue.
EnGarde Secure LinuxGuardian Digital reports that PHP packages shipped with some versions of EnGarde had debugging enabled, causing them to not support some third-party add-on packages. This update disables debugging.
New Distributions Bonzai LinuxBonzai Linux, formerly known as miniwoody, has released version 1.5. Found on Debian Planet.
DietLinuxDietLinux is a dietlibc-based Linux distribution. Glibc is fully avoided. Some of the most important server daemons (DHCP, DNS, etc.) are working. The initial version, 0.1, was released May 16, 2003. DietLinux has joined the "Special Purpose" section of our Distributions List.
FreepiaFreepia is small GNU/Linux distribution designed to run on Via Epia-M Mainboards. At present it only runs on the M-9000. The motivation behind this project is to build a full featured, low noise media box to play movies/mp3s/images etc. It currently uses Freevo, but in the future there maybe support for other media players like mythtv or vdr. Version 0.3.1 was released on May 17, 2003. Freepia has also joined the "Special Purpose" section of our Distributions List.
ThinStationThinStation is a Linux distribution that enables you to convert standard PCs into full-featured diskless thinclients supporting all major connectivity protocols. It can be booted from the network using Etherboot/PXE or from standard media like floppy/CD/hd/flash-disk etc. The configuration is centralized to simplify terminal management. Version 0.91 was released on May 15, 2003.
Minor distribution updates BBIagentBBIagent has released v1.8.1 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Parallel port or USB printers attaching to the router can now be shared by other computers on the network with LPR or RAW protocol."
Damn Small LinuxDamn Small Linux has released v0.3.9 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This version features PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE) so that it works with ADSL connections. XMMS can now play MPEGs thanks to the SDL plugin. It also includes Zile, a very small yet powerful Emacs clone."
KnoppixKnoppix has released v3.2-2003-05-16 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: Support for some TFT displays, updated drivers for wireless cards, several other updates, and improved auto-detection."
MorphixMorphix has released v0.3-6 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release adds heaps of bugfixes (and probably new bugs), a new, pretty Xcursor, and a load of other changes. icewm has been replaced with XFCE4 in LightGUI."
MulimidixMulimidix has released v0.1.9pre with major bugfixes. "Changes: This release features the 2.4.20 kernel and VDR 1.1.29 (including AIO). Various bugfixes were made, the configuration scripts were updated, and a lot of other useful stuff was added."
PXES Linux Thin ClientPXES Linux Thin Client has released v0.5.1-41 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: Some important changes include ISOPXES to generate bootable PXES CDs and a telnet server. The ability to create "multi-session" images containing more than one cliet session code was added. The local session was improved. The session used can be decided at run time and the interactive selection of many parameters were added. Outstanding is the ability to select IP address parameters at runtime, freeing it from the DHCP. The look and feel have been improved too. Various client sessions were added (partial) aiming to be the real Universal Linux Thin Client."
WarewulfWarewulf has released v1.11 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: A fix for a permission issue in the node filesystem with /dev/zero and a bug in nodeupdate regarding node permissions. Some GUI bugs were also fixed, and optimizations were made in wwnodes."
Distribution reviews Booting Your Business Card: Linux-BBC 2.1 (Linux Journal)The Linux Journal reviews LNX-BBC 2.1. "There are no man pages, however. Linux-BBC is very much a 'we expect you to know what you're doing' kind of distribution. After all, you can run screen, ssh out to a working system, read the fine manual and cut-and-paste code back into the local host."
Debian on Steroids II: The Libranet Workout (Linux Journal)Linux Journal reviews Libranet, version 2.8. "Libranet's proprietary features are ease of installation and administration. While based on the rock-solid Debian Woody, Libranet also includes up-to-date applications from the Debian testing and unstable versions, making sure that everything works smoothly and together. Updates come from Sarge, the testing branch. Is that worth paying for? With a full 30-day refund guarantee, trying it yourself is the best way to answer the question."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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