Caldera Smallfoot

Last updated

Smallfoot was the name of both a rapid application development toolkit and an embedded operating system designed and released by Caldera Systems/Caldera International/The SCO Group in both UnixWare and Linux formats. [1] [2] Created for use in embedded environments such as point of sale systems and video gaming, the toolkits were intended to create specifically tailored operating systems geared towards the desired use. [3] These customized and stripped down versions of the operating systems made less of a footprint, hence the names Smallfoot embedded UNIX and Smallfoot embedded Linux respectively. [1]

Contents

Smallfoot is also notable in that it was a key Linux product of The SCO Group, developed for both the UNIX and Linux platforms and distributed by SCO and Caldera Systems/Caldera International after its purchase of SCO. In the SCO v. IBM lawsuit, SCO denied distribution of Linux kernel code, however SCO Smallfoot is based on both 2.4.10 and 2.6.1 Linux kernel versions.[ citation needed ]

History

Smallfoot was first proposed in 2001. The name Smallfoot (whilst trademarked by SCO) was never the intended product's final name, but rather was a working name that stuck. A first prototype was built around the Linux platform. A deal was signed in January 2003 for Smallfoot to work on Beetle point-of-sale terminals from Wincor Nixdorf. [4]

But given the SCO–Linux disputes that were underway a couple of months later, the Smallfoot Toolkit development switched to a Unix-based OS in May 2003.

The formatting of the toolkit configuration language drew heavily on Tcl. The toolkit included extensive configuration of many parts of the system, JavaPOS library, newly developed drivers for Point-of-Sale (POS) devices, and a POS application. A complete POS terminal developed with the Smallfoot Toolkit release 1.0 was demonstrated at SCO Forum in 2004 in Las Vegas, where breakout sessions entitled "Build a Smallfoot OS Using the Smallfoot Toolkit" and "Smallfoot is Not Just for Retail Anymore" were held. [5] The further development, including a GUI, was shelved until the sales of the command-line version of the toolkit would pick up and provide a revenue stream.

The product itself was announced in June 2004, as part of a roadmap presented by SCO intended to show renewed investment in their Unix product lines. [6] The Smallfoot Toolkit product went onto the SCO price list in July 2004. The minimal bundle was priced at approximately $35,000 and included the Toolkit, UnixWare license for the development machine running the toolkit, 500 deployment UnixWare licenses for the generated images, 10 hours of support. Larger volumes of the deployment licenses provided extra per-license discounts. None were ever sold and eventually the product was discontinued.

Eventually an outgrowth of Smallfoot found a customer, Budgens supermarkets. Budgens, a part of the Musgrave Group, were looking to implement Linux at their point of sale systems. [7] The project became an early success story in terms of stores taking a chance on a Linux-based solution. [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Novell</span> 1980–2014 American multinational software and services company

Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United Linux</span> Linux distribution

United Linux was an attempt by a consortium of Linux distributors to create a common base distribution for enterprise use, so as to minimize duplication of engineering effort and form an effective competitor to Red Hat. The founding members of United Linux were SUSE, Turbolinux, Conectiva and Caldera International. The consortium was announced on May 30, 2002. The end of the project was announced on January 22, 2004.

<i>SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp.</i>

SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp., commonly abbreviated as SCO v. IBM, is a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court of Utah. The SCO Group asserted that there are legal uncertainties regarding the use of the Linux operating system due to alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM. The lawsuit was filed in 2003, it has lingered on through the bankruptcy of SCO Group and the adverse result in SCO v. Novell, and was reopened for continued litigation by order of a new judge on June 14, 2013. Pursuant to the court order reopening the case, an IBM Motion for Summary Judgment was filed based upon the results of the Novell decision. On December 15, 2014, the judge granted most of IBM's motion, thereby narrowing the scope of the case, which remained open. On March 1, 2016, following a ruling against the last remaining claims, the judge dismissed SCO's suit against IBM with prejudice. SCO filed an appeal later that month. In February 2018, as a result of the appeal and the case being partially remanded to the circuit court, the parties restated their remaining claims and provided a plan to move toward final judgement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SCO Group</span> Defunct American software company

The SCO Group was an American software company in existence from 2002 to 2012 that became known for owning Unix operating system assets that had belonged to the Santa Cruz Operation, including the UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, and then, under CEO Darl McBride, pursuing a series of high-profile legal battles known as the SCO-Linux controversies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caldera International</span> Defunct American software company

Caldera International, Inc., earlier Caldera Systems, was an American software company that existed from 1998 to 2002 and developed and sold Linux- and Unix-based operating system products.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Santa Cruz Operation</span> Software company based in Santa Cruz, California

The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. was an American software company, based in Santa Cruz, California, that was best known for selling three Unix operating system variants for Intel x86 processors: Xenix, SCO UNIX, and UnixWare.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UnixWare</span> Unix operating system

UnixWare is a Unix operating system. It was originally released by Univel, a jointly owned venture of AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) and Novell. It was then taken over by Novell. Via Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), it went on to Caldera Systems, Caldera International, and The SCO Group before it was sold to UnXis. UnixWare is typically deployed as a server rather than a desktop. Binary distributions of UnixWare are available for x86 architecture computers. UnixWare is primarily marketed as a server operating system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UNIX System V</span> Early commercial UNIX operating system

Unix System V is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4. System V Release 4 (SVR4) was commercially the most successful version, being the result of an effort, marketed as Unix System Unification, which solicited the collaboration of the major Unix vendors. It was the source of several common commercial Unix features. System V is sometimes abbreviated to SysV.

In a series of legal disputes between SCO Group and Linux vendors and users, SCO alleged that its license agreements with IBM meant that source code IBM wrote and donated to be incorporated into Linux was added in violation of SCO's contractual rights. Members of the Linux community disagreed with SCO's claims; IBM, Novell, and Red Hat filed claims against SCO.

<i>SCO Group, Inc. v. Novell, Inc.</i>

SCO v. Novell was a United States lawsuit in which the software company The SCO Group (SCO), claimed ownership of the source code for the Unix operating system. SCO sought to have the court declare that SCO owned the rights to the Unix code, including the copyrights, and that Novell had committed slander of title by asserting a rival claim to ownership of the Unix copyrights. Separately, SCO was attempting to collect license fees from Linux end-users for Unix code through their SCOsource division, and Novell's rival ownership claim was a direct challenge to this initiative. Novell had been increasing their investments in and support of Linux at this time, and was opposed to SCO's attempts to collect license fees from Novell's potential customers.

Lineo was a thin client and embedded systems company spun out of Caldera Thin Clients by 20 July 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenServer</span> Closed source version of Unix developed by SCO

Xinuos OpenServer, previously SCO UNIX and SCO Open Desktop, is a closed source computer operating system developed by Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), later acquired by SCO Group, and now owned by Xinuos. Early versions of OpenServer were based on UNIX System V, while the later OpenServer 10 is based on FreeBSD 10. However, OpenServer 10 has not received any updates since 2018 and is no longer marketed on Xinuos's website, while OpenServer 5 Definitive and 6 Definitive are still supported.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Project Monterey</span> 1990s Unix coalition

Project Monterey was an attempt to build a single Unix operating system that ran across a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, as well as supporting multi-processing. Announced in October 1998, several Unix vendors were involved; IBM provided POWER and PowerPC support from AIX, Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) provided IA-32 support, and Sequent added multi-processing (MP) support from their DYNIX/ptx system. Intel Corporation provided expertise and ISV development funding for porting to their upcoming IA-64 CPU platform, which was yet to be released at that time. The focus of the project was to create an enterprise-class UNIX for IA-64, which at the time was expected to eventually dominate the UNIX server market.

Caldera OpenLinux (COL) is a defunct Linux distribution. Caldera originally introduced it in 1997 based on the German LST Power Linux distribution, and then taken over and further developed by Caldera Systems since 1998. A successor to the Caldera Network Desktop put together by Caldera since 1995, OpenLinux was an early "business-oriented distribution" and foreshadowed the direction of developments that came to most other distributions and the Linux community generally.

In Unix computing, lxrun is a compatibility layer to allow Linux binaries to run on UnixWare, SCO OpenServer and Solaris without recompilation. It was created by Mike Davidson. It has been an open source software project since 1997, and is available under the Mozilla Public License. Both SCO and Sun Microsystems began officially supporting lxrun in 1999.

SUSE Linux is a computer operating system developed by SUSE. It is built on top of the free and open-source Linux kernel and is distributed with system and application software from other open source projects. SUSE Linux is of German origin, its name being an acronym of "Software und System-Entwicklung", and it was mainly developed in Europe. The first version appeared in early 1994, making SUSE one of the oldest existing commercial distributions. It is known for its YaST configuration tool.

Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel. The resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments, under the GNU General Public License v2 with a syscall exception meaning anything that uses the kernel via system calls are not subject to the GNU GPL.

SCO Skunkware, often referred to as simply "Skunkware", is a collection of open-source software projects ported, compiled, and packaged for free redistribution on SCO operating environments. SCO Skunkware packaged components exist for SCO Xenix, SCO UNIX, SCO OpenServer 5, SCO OpenServer 6, UnixWare 2, Caldera OpenLinux, Open UNIX 8, and UnixWare 7. SCO Skunkware was an early pioneering effort to bring open source software into the realm of business computing and, as such, provided an important initial impetus to the acceptance and adoption of open source software in the small and medium business market. An extensive SCO Skunkware download area has been maintained since 1993 and SCO Skunkware components were shipped with operating system distributions as far back as 1983 when Xenix for the IBM XT was released by The Santa Cruz Operation. The annual SCO Forum conference was a venue for the makers and users of SCO Skunkware to meet and discuss its contents and ideas for future additions.

Caldera was a US-based software company founded in 1994 to develop Linux- and DOS-based operating system products.

References

  1. 1 2 SCO (2004-06-15). "SCO Announces Broad Array of New Unix Products, Channel Support and Training Programs". Archived from the original on 2007-12-25. Retrieved 2007-10-05.
  2. ↑ SCO (2003-01-13). "SCO and Wincor Nixdorf to Offer Joint Retail Solutions". Archived from the original on 2006-10-17. Retrieved 2007-10-05.
  3. ↑ CRN (2003-08-19). "SCO: Project Legend, UnixWare SVR6 Will Drive Future Channel Business". Archived from the original on 2013-01-20. Retrieved 2007-10-05.
  4. ↑ Shankland, Stephen (2003-01-15). "SCO rings up cash register deal". ZDNet.
  5. ↑ SCO Forum 2004: Schedule. The SCO Group.
  6. ↑ Weiss, Todd R. (2004-06-21). "SCO Pushes New Unix Offerings". Computerworld. p. 10.
  7. ↑ Archived 2008-01-24 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ↑ CA and OSS, enable Budgens to save 375,000 GBP Archived 2006-07-17 at the Wayback Machine
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.