Darl Charles McBride is an entrepreneur and CEO of Shout TV Inc. McBride is known as the former CEO of The SCO Group. On March 7, 2003, during McBride's tenure as CEO of the company, The SCO Group initiated litigation against IBM, alleging breach of contract and copyright infringement claims connected to Unix. SCO Group lost in a series of court battles, and was eventually forced into bankruptcy.
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.
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.
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.
Groklaw is a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003, by paralegal Pamela Jones ("PJ"), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML.
Pamela Jones, commonly known as PJ, is the creator and was editor of Groklaw, a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open-source software community. Jones is an Open Source advocate who previously trained and worked as a paralegal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Beginning in 2003, The SCO Group was involved in a dispute with various Linux vendors and users. SCO initiated a series of lawsuits, the most known of which were SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell, that had implications upon the futures of both Linux and Unix. SCO claimed that Linux violated some of SCO's intellectual properties. Many industry observers were skeptical of SCO's claims, and they were strongly contested by SCO's opponents in the lawsuits, some of which launched counter-claims. By 2011, the lawsuits fully related to Linux had been lost by SCO or rendered moot and SCO had gone into bankruptcy. However the SCO v. IBM suit continued for another decade, as it included contractual disputes related to both companies' involvement in Project Monterey in addition Linux-related claims. Finally in 2021 a settlement was reached in which IBM paid the bankruptcy trustee representing what remained of SCO the sum of $14.25 million.
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.
Ralph J. Yarro is founder/CEO and chairman of ThinkAtomic, Inc. an early stage venture accelerator and incubator of technology firms. He was previously chairman of the board and the largest shareholder in The SCO Group, Inc. and CEO of The Canopy Group, Inc.
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.
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. 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. 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.
The Planet was a privately held dedicated server company based in Texas. In May 2006, the company merged with Everyone's Internet, which used the EV1 Servers brand. In 2010, they merged with SoftLayer. All services provided by both companies were then operated under the SoftLayer name.
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.
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.
Xinuos is an American software company that was created in 2011 and was first called UnXis until assuming its current name in 2013. Xinuos develops and markets the Unix-based OpenServer 6, OpenServer 5, and UnixWare 7 operating systems under SCO branding. Xinuos formerly sold the FreeBSD-based OpenServer 10 operating system.
