There was a time when SCO was a great company. No. Seriously. SCO Unix was a great Unix for x86 systems, and, for a brief shining moment it looked like SCO would bring together the best things of both Unix and Linux. Then, SCO’s ownership got it into their heads that trying to take IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and anyone who else who used Linux was a great plan. Ha!
As Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw, points out, SCO appears to be heading towards Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. For those of you who don’t know, Chapter 7 can be thought of as the Go to Jail card in the game Monopoly. “Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.” Or, go out of business; do not come back; please leave the plumbing in the restrooms on your way out the door.
But now what? Novell owns Unix. There’s still some good stuff left in there that isn’t duplicated in Linux.
We’ll never see an open-source SVRx (System V Release X) Unix though. Ransom Love, the former CEO of Caldera/SCO, had intended on combing Linux and Unix, but SCO quickly found that Unix was filled with other companies’ copyrighted code. As Love said in 2003, “Indeed, at first we wanted to open-source all of Unix’s code, but we quickly found that even though we owned it, it was, and still is, full of other companies copyrights.”