63 Facts About SCO Group

SCO Group began in 2002 with a renaming of Caldera International, accompanied by McBride becoming CEO and a major change in business strategy and direction.

The SCO Group brand was re-emphasized and new releases of UnixWare and OpenServer came out.

SCO Group attempted some initiatives in the e-commerce space with the SCOBiz and SCOx programs.

In 2003, the SCO Group claimed that the increasingly popular free Linux operating system contained substantial amounts of Unix code that IBM had improperly put there.

SCO Group soon became, as Businessweek headlined, "The Most Hated Company In Tech".

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SCO Group stock rose rapidly during 2003, but then SCOsource revenue became erratic and the stock began a long fall.

SCO Group made a major push in the burgeoning smartphones space, launching the Me Inc platform for mobility services.

SCO Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection soon after and attempted to continue operations.

SCO Group built a large community of value-added resellers that eventually became 15, 000 strong and many of its sales of its SCO Group OpenServer product to small and medium-sized businesses went through those resellers.

In 1995, SCO Group bought the System V Release 4 and UnixWare business from Novell to improve its technology base.

SCO Group did this via a multimedia display in which an image of Caldera was shattered and replaced by The SCO Group's logo, which was a slightly more stylized version of the old Santa Cruz Operation logo.

McBride announced, "SCO Group is back from the dead, " and a story in The Register began, "SCO Group lives again.

Change back to a SCO Group-based name reflected recognition of the reality that almost all of the company's revenue was coming from Unix, not Linux, products.

Furthermore the SCO Group brand was better known than the Caldera one, especially in Europe, and SCO Group's large, existing reseller and partner channel was resistant to switching to Caldera's product priorities.

Product name Caldera OpenLinux became "SCO Group Linux powered by UnitedLinux" and all other Caldera branded names were changed as well.

The SCO Group product was targeted towards the small-to-medium business market, whereas the SuSE product was aimed at the enterprise segment and Conectiva and Turbolinux were intended mostly for the South American and Asian markets.

An assessment of SCO Group Linux 4 in eWeek found that it was a capable product, although the Webmin configuration tool was seen as limited when compared to YaST, SuSE's own operating system configuration tool.

In terms of service and support, SCO Group pledged to field a set of escalation engineers that would only be handling SCO Group Linux issues.

SCO Group had been a manager at Novell in 1993 when Novell had bought Unix System Laboratories, and all of its Unix assets, including copyrights, trademarks, and licensing contracts, for $335 million.

SCO Group's wrote that a draft press release concerning SCO's plans had been in the works for several weeks and had been quietly circulated to other companies in the industry.

The suit initially coincided with SCO Group's existing relationship with IBM to sell UnixWare on IBM Netfinity systems.

In mid-May 2003, SCO Group sent a letter to some 1, 500 companies, cautioning them that using Linux could put them in legal jeopardy.

Jack Messman, the CEO of Novell, accused SCO Group of attempting an extortion plan against Linux users and distributors.

Novell and the SCO Group quickly fell into a vocal dispute that revolved around the interpretation of the 1995 asset-transfer agreement between them.

In July 2003, SCO Group began offering UnixWare licenses for commercial Linux users, stating that "SCO Group will hold harmless commercial Linux customers that purchase a UnixWare license against any past copyright violations, and for any future use of Linux in a run-only, binary format.

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In December 2003, SCO Group sent letters to 1, 000 Linux customers that in essence accused them of making illegal use of SCO Group's intellectual property.

On January 20, 2004, the SCO Group filed a slander of title suit against Novell, alleging that Novell had exhibited bad faith in denying SCO's intellectual property rights to Unix and UnixWare and that Novell had made false statements in an effort to persuade companies and organizations not to do business with SCO.

In July 2003, the SCO Group announced it had acquired Vultus Inc for an unspecified price.

An analyst for IDC said that if SCO Group were more forthcoming on the details, "the whole discussion might take a different tone.

However during Forum, SCO Group did publicly show several alleged examples of illegal copying of copyright code in Linux.

SCO Group claimed the infringements were divided into four separate categories: literal copying, obfuscation, derivative works, and non-literal transfers.

Stakes were high in the battle the SCO Group had started, involving the future of Unix, Linux, and open source software in general.

Linux advocates were incensed by SCO Group's actions, accusing the company of trying reap financial gain by sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Linux within the industry.

SCO Group suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack against its website in early May 2003, the first of several times the website would be shut down by hackers.

The September 22, 2003 issue of InfoWorld had a dual-orientation cover that, if read right side up, had thumbs-up picture with the text "If SCO Group Loses", and if read upside down, had a thumbs-down picture with the text "If SCO Group Wins".

Distaste for SCO Group's actions seeped into evaluations of SCO Group's product line and technical initiatives as well.

There's a perception among companies we've spoken to that SCO Group is really out to get acquired or to make their money off of licensing schemes rather than technologies.

In some ways, SCO Group was Linux before Linux, popularizing Unix on low-cost Intel machines.

Columnist Maureen O'Gara, generally seen as at least somewhat sympathetic to SCO Group's position, characterized McBride as "the most hated man in the computer industry".

The SCO group had 340 employees worldwide when the lawsuits were first underway in 2003.

Nevertheless, by the calculation of the Deseret News, SCO Group had gained a net $37 million out of the arrangement.

SCO Group had to restate three of its quarterly earnings statements due to accounting mistakes and was at risk of being delisted by NASDAQ.

The idea of the SCO Group becoming a lawsuits-only company had been proposed by BayStar but it was not something McBride wanted to do.

SCO Group still had a market presence in some of its traditional strongholds, such as pharmacy chains and fast-food restaurants.

SCO Group announced a Unix roadmap along with the UnixWare release, intending to convince the market that it was making a strong push in software products.

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Accordingly, the SCO Group devoted a large effort, consisting of extensive research and development as well as associated product management activities, into producing the more modern OpenServer Release 6, code-named "Legend".

SCO Group Inc is in the headlines more often for its legal battles than for its products these days.

Some SCO Group partners were quoted as saying they intended to migrate to it.

SCO Group continued to do poorly financially, with fiscal 2005 producing revenues of $36 million and a loss on that of almost $11 million, while fiscal 2006 saw revenues of $29 million together with a loss of over $16 million.

In February 2006, SCO Group announced that the edge processor had the product name EdgeClick.

McBride, who had been looking at various new business opportunities for SCO Group to enter, saw the company's mobility initiative as something that could become a big success in both the business and consumer spaces, saying "We don't know for sure, but we have a little bit of a spark in our eyes that this will be a big deal.

SCO Group undertook the proposing of customized mobile applications for various businesses and organizations, using the Me Inc platform as a starting point.

However, the SCO Group being able to succeed in these efforts faced somewhat long odds, in part due to their being up against many kinds of competition in the mobile space and in part due to the negative feelings about SCO that their campaign against Linux had engendered.

SCO Group's mobility initiative was a main theme of the 2006 instance of its SCO Group Forum conference, held at The Mirage in Las Vegas.

In October 2008, during SCO Group Tec Forum 2008, the last Forum ever held, the SCO Group Mobile Server platform was announced, which was a bundling of the Edgeclick server-side functionality and Me Inc client development kit on top of a UnixWare 7 or Openserver 6 system.

Judge Dale A Kimball of the United States District Court for the District of Utah issued a 102-page summary judgment which found that Novell, not the SCO Group, was the owner of the Unix copyrights; that Novell could force SCO to drop its copyrights-based claims against IBM; and most immediately from a financial perspective, that SCO owed Novell 95 percent of the revenues generated by the licensing of Unix to companies such as Microsoft and Sun.

The only SCO Group claims left intact by Kimball's judgment were ones against IBM related to contractual provisions from Project Monterey.

On September 14, 2008, the SCO Group filed a voluntary petition for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.

Interest of Stephen Norris Capital Partners in the SCO Group started in February 2008, when it put forward a $100 million reorganization and debt financing plan for the company, which it would then take private.

In January 2009, the SCO Group asked the bankruptcy court to approve a plan wherein its Unix and mobility assets for would be put up for public auction.

In September 2010 the SCO Group finally put up the remainder of its non-lawsuit assets for public auction.

In particular, UnXis took over the product names, ownership, and maintenance of The SCO Group's flagship operating system products, OpenServer and UnixWare.

TSG SCO Group did not have employees per se; any at the Utah site not hired by UnXis were let go.