An early open-source champion is threatening to revoke IBM's
licence to use Unix code.
The
news that the SCO Group has filed a lawsuit against IBM,
alleging "misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference,
unfair competition and breach of contract", and requesting damages
"no less than $1bn" is extraordinary enough. But on closer
inspection, the story turns out to be even more remarkable.
As the
timeline
indicates, SCO originally began by selling Xenix, a version of Unix
for Intel 8086 and 8088 processors. What the timeline does not
mention is the fact that Xenix was a joint project of SCO and a
certain small Seattle company called Microsoft. It is rather ironic
that Microsoft helped develop, and sold, a Unix variant running on
Intel processors a decade before Linus Torvalds sat down in his
Helsinki bedroom and started coding his own take on the idea.
SCO continued to sell its Unix solutions for Intel, but once
GNU/Linux reached version 1.0 in March 1994, it was fighting a
losing battle. GNU/Linux cost nothing, offered most of the power of
SCO's products, and gave software engineers the code to look at,
change and improve.
Although SCO made various half-hearted concessions to users - for
example, in May 1998 it started offering low-cost licences and the
source code, but only for "ancient" versions of its software - in
many ways the GNU/Linux versus SCO story reads like a dry run for
the later GNU/Linux versus Microsoft tussle. SCO's final, symbolic
defeat at the hands of GNU/Linux occurred in 2001, when most of it
was bought by Caldera.
Although relatively unknown, Caldera can claim with some justice to
have been one of the principal architects of GNU/Linux's success in
the
mainstream business sector. The company grew out of a
"skunkworks" project at Novell that used GNU/Linux to create a
graphical browser, complete with a virtual world interface that let
users navigate the network and move around the intranet. Impressive
enough, but what makes this truly amazing is the fact that it was
achieved back in 1994, when Netscape was still called Mosaic
Communications.
It is an interesting exercise to contemplate how online and
computer history might have been different had Novell decided to
develop this virtual world internet browser running on top of
GNU/Linux in 1994. But it didn't, choosing instead to fight an
increasingly hopeless battle against TCP/IP that led directly to
its marginal status today.
After being rebuffed by Novell management, some of the skunkworks
team decided to set up their own company based around GNU/Linux,
and Caldera was founded in October 1994. The name - which refers to
the bowl-shaped crater left by a collapsed volcano - was inspired
by a camping trip taken by one of the company's founders.
Caldera came out with its first product, Caldera Network Desktop,
in 1995. This offered a complete graphical user interface for
GNU/Linux at a time when Windows 95 had only just appeared.
To bolster the usefulness of the open source operating system for
business, Caldera worked with other software companies to port
their enterprise programs: one notable success was the Adabas D
database from Software AG.
It also carried out portings on its own. For example, in 1997 it
announced that it would port to GNU/Linux the entry-level web
server of Netscape - at that time, the leading internet company -
as well as the Navigator browser. Unfortunately, a month after
Caldera proudly announced its exclusive rights to Netscape
Navigator on GNU/Linux, the Mozilla open source project was
unveiled, making its multimillion-dollar licensing deal
worthless.
Caldera supported GNU/Linux development in other ways, too. Alan
Cox, the number two kernel hacker, received a two-processor system
so that he could add multiprocessor support to Linux. This appeared
in version 2.0 of Linux, which was released in June 1996.
Caldera seemed to be doing the Linux world a favour when it bought
SCO and, with it, all the rights to Unix. If nothing else, this
appeared to guarantee that there would never be any intellectual
property issues for Linux as far as Unix was concerned. But the
recent action of Caldera - which was transformed back into SCO when
a new chief executive took over in 2002 - reveals the mutability of
fate.