One thing that the author of this article left out is that SCO was not SCO during this dark period of litigation.
SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) was an x86 UNIX vendor that wasn't great, but enjoyed a lot of market share. I'd estimate they were #2 to SUN in installations because it ran on commodity x86 hardware. But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the pressure from Linux. When the company was sold to Caldera in Utah, very few original SCO people stayed, and those that did left quickly because Ransom Love (yes, that was his name) made it very clear the Caldera culture was not the old SCO culture, and that you'd have to relocate to Utah.
Following this, Caldera rebranded themselves back to SCO (The SCO Group) in an effort to convince people they were the same company. After all, they needed all the help they could get.
So, essentially, litigation SCO was not the original SCO. And in many ways, litigation SCO tarnished whatever respect the original SCO had.
Fond memories of OpenLinux because (iirc) the installer had off-brand Tetris you could play while it laboriously copied files from CD to HDD. Always thought that was a little funny given the antics they got up to later.
>But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the pressure from Linux.
They were savaged by Windows NT before Linux became an appreciable factor. Which was one of the main arguments against Linux causing faux-SCO (as an industry colleague of mine liked to refer to them as) economic harm even if their claims were true--which they weren't.
But also, yeah, charting the corporate identities through that period was hard to keep straight. There was also a branch of Santa Cruz desktop products that ended up with Sun.
And litigation-SCO deliberately tried to confound the two, so that people assumed that litigation-SCO had all the IP rights that original-SCO once had. They didn't, though, as the court case showed.
SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) was an x86 UNIX vendor that wasn't great, but enjoyed a lot of market share. I'd estimate they were #2 to SUN in installations because it ran on commodity x86 hardware. But by the late 1990s, they knew their time was up given the pressure from Linux. When the company was sold to Caldera in Utah, very few original SCO people stayed, and those that did left quickly because Ransom Love (yes, that was his name) made it very clear the Caldera culture was not the old SCO culture, and that you'd have to relocate to Utah.
Following this, Caldera rebranded themselves back to SCO (The SCO Group) in an effort to convince people they were the same company. After all, they needed all the help they could get.
So, essentially, litigation SCO was not the original SCO. And in many ways, litigation SCO tarnished whatever respect the original SCO had.