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A comment on The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later. Parent comment

Re:The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by cjensen on Saturday March 04, 2023 @02:10AM (#35018902)
SCO the "cool UNIX vendor" was not the company that sued. In 2001, the cool UNIX vendor was struggling and sold its UNIX business to Caldera. Caldera renamed itself "the SCO Group" and filed the lawsuit. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation

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Re:The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by noisy_boy on Saturday March 04, 2023 @02:56AM (#35019098)
I remember seeing original SCO unix in our server room in 1998 - they were a legitimate player then but I also remember seeing all new orders going for SunOS (and later for Sun Solaris).
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Re:The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by robennals on Saturday March 04, 2023 @09:31AM (#35020963)
Internally, SCO used to joke that they were “the most popular operating system you haven’t heard of”.

It was (at that time) the best Unix on cheap x86 hardware, so it was deployed everywhere. In gas station pumps, in cash registers, in ATMs, in back office databases. I think SCO made up the majority of Oracle database instances.

Most people interacted with SCO code on a daily basis but didn’t know.

Of course they rapidly lost the x86 UNIX crown to Linux. At the time I was there SCO could still do a lot of stuff well that Linux couldn’t, but the advantages were rapidly going down and the writing was on the wall.

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Re:The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by sgt on Saturday March 04, 2023 @02:57AM (#35019111)
In my mind, I associate Caldera with that Linux distribution that was pretty OK, but nothing to write home about.
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Re:The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by jzb on Saturday March 04, 2023 @03:18AM (#35019208)
Caldera’s big trick IIRC was its installer. You could play Tetris in the installer while it copied packages onto the hard drive. It was also a better installer for new users than a lot of others. I think the desktop experience was pretty polished for the time, too.
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Re:The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by sgt on Saturday March 04, 2023 @07:21AM (#35020299)
That's brilliant! I wish more installers did that.
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Re:The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by jasoneckert on Saturday March 04, 2023 @02:29PM (#35023701)
They also had Minesweeper too (I can't remember if it was a choice, or they had two distro flavors - one with Tetris and one with Minesweeper).
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Re:The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by dagw on Saturday March 04, 2023 @02:57PM (#35023934)
Caldera, pre SCO, was actually pretty sold 'professional' desktop OS. A place I worked at used it and we had a bunch of developers and researchers with Windows backgrounds that were using Linux for the first time and they all found it a pretty smooth and polished desktop and development experience over all.
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Re:The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by wsc981 on Saturday March 04, 2023 @06:35AM (#35020101)
Let's not forget the following [0]:

> SCO's Linux lawsuit made no sense and no one at the time gave it much of a chance of succeeding. Over time it was revealed that Microsoft had been using SCO as a sock puppet against Linux. Unfortunately for Microsoft and SCO, it soon became abundantly clear that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux and its allies.

In a way this was a proxy war of Microsoft vs Linux.

---

[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sco-linux-fud-returns-from-the...

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Re:The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by up2isomorphism on Saturday March 04, 2023 @08:59AM (#35020793)
Microsoft is very very American.
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