Caleb Love's List: Ransom Love Linux History

•  SCO sells out to Caldera 
  
    By Ed Scannell and Dan Neel  
   August 2, 2000 3:38 pm PT
• "We now have the UnixWare kernel to build on, which we need to expand the data center's capabilities across the Internet. We will then put a Linux personality on top of that," said Ransom Love, presently Caldera's president and CEO but who will become CEO of the enlarged Caldera.
  
   Love said that users and developers will be able to scale Unix and Linux using existing and yet-to-be-developed applications aimed at both Intel's IA-32 and IA-64 platforms.
  
   Doug Michaels, Caldera's president and CEO who will now join Caldera's board, echoed Love's thoughts, saying that his company has been targeting Linux as an important platform for some time. He added that putting a Linux personality into UnixWare is a "great way to capture applications going forward."
  
   According to one analyst, however, a less positive reason for the deal is that SCO's Server Software Division and Professional Services Division are rapidly losing market share to Linux, because they served the low-end Unix needs of small to midsize businesses, where Linux is most successful today.
  
   "SCO has been under a lot of pressure because Linux had been eating at their market share," said Tony Iams, a research analyst at D. H. Brown, in Port Chester, N.Y. "And at one point SCO decided that they themselves would jump into the Linux market and were just about to do it, but the risk was too great. They just didn't have it in their DNA and could never convince the whole company to become a Linux supplier, as the leadership [at SCO] wasn't about Linux," Iams said.
  
• "Caldera was a pure Linux distributor, but now they have all this closed-source Unix from SCO," Iams explained. "They can't just open up the closed code ... they can't afford to open it up. What is there left to sell if everything is open source? So they're thinking of making it more open, but slightly restricted."
  
   Iams said the Unix code that Caldera received contains licensed technologies from previous suppliers, namely AT&T and Novell, which create roadblocks in opening up the source code.
  
• That's always the problem when you start with closed source," Iams said. "And Caldera has to be careful. They want to keep the revenue coming in but, at the same time, if they want credibility in the open-source community, they will have to start giving this stuff out and will evaluate doing that on a case-by-case basis."
  
   "Right now there are no plans to open source Unix," Newberger said. "But Caldera owns Unixware now, so obviously the choice is theirs."
  

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