Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary [LWN.net]

[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"?

Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

Posted May 22, 2003 10:22 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] (1 responses)

In the immortal words of Mozart's Requiem:

Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis

(The damned, cast away, shall be consigned to the searing flames) (Y'all asked)

Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

Posted May 22, 2003 14:00 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]

If memory serves, the music underlying this
particular phrase was sung in the middle of a
Microsoft advertisement. Which just goes to show
that you'd better check the words before using
a piece of music...!

Hahahaha

Posted May 22, 2003 21:25 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

So they'll still be releasing security updates, will they?

Well, if they haven't shot their foot off already (which they have), a security update to the kernel will have to be released under the GPL also, which shows they are STILL releasing their alleged I.P. under the GPL.

Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

Posted May 23, 2003 14:20 UTC (Fri) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link]

What's the opposite of "rest in peace, Caldera/SCO Linux"?

How about "rest in pieces"?

Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

Posted May 29, 2003 0:03 UTC (Thu) by ladislav (guest, #247) [Link]

It seems that the Caldera/SCO online archives suddenly disappeared, so for the record, here is the full message posted on it on 19 May 2003 (one day after SCO announced that it would suspend its Linux-related activities):

====================
Subject: Status of support for SCO Linux 4.0 and OpenLinux 3.1.1
From: John Boland <jboland@sco.com> (SCO Support)
To: users@lists.caldera.com
Date: 19/05/2003 16:18

All,

For those of you using OpenLinux 3.1.1 products, SCO will continue to honour and renew support agreements and will continue to provide maintenance in the form of security fixes for these products up until the retirement date of the products (planned retirement date is 24th of June 2004).

For those of you using SCO Linux Release 4.0 products, SCO will continue to honour and renew support agreements for these products and will continue to provide maintenance for the products via the SCO Linux Update Service. SCO will also continue to offer maintenance renewals on the SCO Linux Release 4.0 product line.

SCO has no plans to retire SCO Linux at this time.

Regards,

John Boland
SCO Support

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====================

What about the management change?

Posted May 29, 2003 19:23 UTC (Thu) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link]

LWN left out an important point: the changing of the guard shortly before the renaming. When Ransom Love left the company and McBride took over as CEO, the Caldera people had known, loved, and had spats with concerning per-seat licensing ceased to exist. Some people who were involved in SCO years ago have posted to websites saying "This isn't SCO as I knew it, it is Caldera which changed its name to SCO. SCO was a good company." Well, the new SCO isn't Caldera either.

Ransom Love and others at Caldera may have made some poor business decisions and managed to tick people off (I always thought their position on per-seat licensing was perfectly sound- you could copy any of the open source software in their distribution and use it on multiple machines, as required by the licenses, but disallowing doing the same with the entire product was perfectly reasonable) - but the real Caldera would never have been involved in any of the kind of stuff the new SCO is doing.

Caldera/SCO Linux: Obituary

Posted May 29, 2003 20:42 UTC (Thu) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

The discussion of per-seat licensing in Caldera OpenLinux 3.1 and above glosses over a question I considered important at the time, and that Caldera Systems pointedly ignored: What property does the per-seat licence apply to?

Just before Caldera adopted the SCO Group d/b/a, I had an encounter with Caldera's "open source architect" and Linux community liaison, Ronald Joe Record, on a LUG mailing list. A guy named Calvin Chu had had some configuration problems with Caldera 3.1. A few Caldera-haters (not me!) advised him (paraphrasing) that Caldera sucks, and get a real distribution that doesn't try to rip off the community with per-seat licensing, etc.

Ronald attempted to help Calvin, as did I. In addition, Ronald attempted with some sense of long-suffering exasperation to defend Caldera Systems, Inc.'s policies and product to the assembled critics. Among these things, he defended the per-seat licensing.

This got my interest, because I was curious about what specific property the licensing covered. I'm a student of such things, and try to learn about them so I can explain them to others, e.g., at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/suse-product-strategy . I was _not_ out to get Caldera.

So, I got out my Caldera Workstation 3.1 CD, examined it, and reported to the LUG mailing list (and to Joe) what I'd found: http://lists.svlug.org/archives/smaug/2001q3/000122.html In short, I couldn't find anything on the CD that was both owned by Caldera Systems, Inc. and not under freely-redistributable licence terms. So, in the post cited above, I asked Ronald what property the per-seat licensing _does_ applied to. (Note that that couldn't really be a compilation copyright, as such terms would create licence conflict with the GPL terms of some of the constituent codebases.)

I was polite, and stipulated that neither of us was an attorney (in all likelihood), let alone was he probably authorised to address corporate legal matters. But I figured he could at least say "I don't know" or "I'll have to ask the corporate counsel". After all, Ronald did say it was his _job_ to represent the company to the Linux community. I figured it was a logical question for him to receive and pass on, if not answer.

But Ronald did something I didn't expect: He immediately unsubscribed from the entire mailing list and vanished -- and I've never heard an answer from anyone else, either. (Their later making an ISO available gratis for non-commercial usage wasn't an answer.)

I strongly suspect that no answer would have ever come, even without the present legal entanglement -- as my surmise is that Caldera's demand for per-seat licensing fees never had even the tiniest legal foundation. One strains to find a charitible interpretation under which they didn't eventually realise this.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com