The deal is done, SCO Unix and Caldera Linux are now under the same management, but what does that mean for the future of both companies and operating systems?
In general, Doug Michels, SCO CEO and president, believes that, there is "tremendous motion in the computer industry at large and we're at a fundamental turning point. There are two trends. One is the emergence of open source and the other is the adoption of the Internet in the area of business computing." Caldera has chosen to ride the open-source side with operating systems for business and e-business. SCO, however, is focusing solely on Internet business computing, specifically application service providers by investing all of its efforts in Tarantella.
Opening The Code
According to Ransom Love, Caldera Systems' CEO and soon to be CEO of the combined SCO divisions and Caldera Systems, "Caldera has a proven track record of releasing the most important stuff to the open community. We haven't decided on which license to use yet. For standards, GPL makes a lot of sense and every product we'll ship with source code."
Some code, however, can't be open sourced because other companies own it. Caldera sources indicate the code that can be open sourced may be released under several different open-source licenses, including BSD, to the open-source developer community.
Love promises more information at Forum2000, SCO's renamed annual partner/reseller get-together on August 20 to 23 at the University of California. There he will present the broad outlines of Caldera's open-source plans.
While some Linux purists would argue that there's no need to borrow from Unix. Others point out that such UnixWare features as ACL-based security, scalable SMP, logical volume management for storage, high-availability clustering and the VERITAS File System (VxFS) for fast file system recovery would be welcome additions to Linux.
Of course, nothing happens in Linux without its founder's, Linus Torvalds, blessings. Fortunately for Caldera's plans, while he's waiting for the details, Torvalds generally approves of the idea of bringing over the best of Unix to Linux. Contacted by e-mail, Torvalds comments, "I think the most likely scenario would be complementing each other especially in 'non-core' technologies. It can actually go both ways, at least if the eventual license ends up being GPL--UnixWare may end up picking up drivers, etc., from Linux (and stuff that was formerly an add-on, like the lxrun Linux binary emulation stuff)."
While he thinks that, "It's fairly unlikely that Linux/UnixWare would ever meld, but the same sort of thing that has been happening with other Unix components (like IBM's journaling file system getting ported over to Linux, etc.) is probably more likely to happen with UnixWare components."
Inside Of SCO
Internally, about 900 of SCO's 1,100 employees will need to start getting used to having Caldera on their checks instead of SCO. The remaining 200, according to Doug Michel, SCO CEO, will be working on Tarantella.
Michel explains that because SCO pretty much represents Tarantella and investments, it's possible a name change is in order but that there are "no such plans at this time."
What is planned is a renewed focus on Tarantella. Michel explains, "We see Tarantella as a high-growth, exciting possibility and we will build it as fast as possible." Contrary to some rumors, there are no plans to sell Tarantella or IPO a new Tarantella company.
SCO also will get the revenue stream from Caldera's sales and support of what was SCO's OpenServer operating system. These funds will be used to fuel up Tarantella for the race against the product's ASP middleware chief competitor: Citrix's MetaFrame.
Partners And Customers
In the days ahead, SCO will work closely with Caldera to transition SCO's Unix product line and Professional Services to the new ownership. Love said that, "We will release information on our combined product lines and services at Forum2000."
Sources at both companies indicate that there will be no unpleasant or unexpected changes in the new company's partnering relationships or pricing. For now, it's business as usual.
UnixWare and OpenServer, SCO's Server division's pride and joy, will now be sold, managed and supported by Caldera. There won't be any immediate change -- except the name on the invoices and the addition of Caldera's Linux line to SCO's lines -- for customers and partners. Indeed, partners are very likely to be dealing with the same support and sales staff they did before the buyout.
For Caldera partners, the changes will appear sooner. With the inclusion of SCO Professional Service in the new Caldera, you can expect Caldera to be offering more comprehensive support and service plans in the near future. There also will be many more avenues -- thanks to SCO's channel partners -- to obtain Caldera's products and services. For Caldera, that means the company has gotten truly worldwide professional partners with this one purchase.
As time goes on, you can expect to see the product lines start to merge as Caldera integrates the best features of Unix and Linux together. In the short term, you can expect to see a major revision to OpenServer; UnixWare gain the ability to run binary Linux applications; and, given that Caldera was the first to release a "technology developer release preview" (a.k.a. a late beta) of the soon to be arriving Linux kernel, Linux 2.4 , one of the first Linux 2.4 releases. If you ever wanted a one-stop company for both your Unix and Linux needs, Caldera aims to be your company of choice.
