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"?