SCO only sold the IP for Unixware and OpenServer to Xinuos, retaining whatever rights were needed to continue the lawsuits with IBM and others. I believe at that point, the leftovers of SCO were called TSG (short for “The SCO Group”). In their early days, Xinuos would make a point of stating that the old SCO lawsuits were nothing to do with them.
The irony here is that the real, original SCO (or rather, the Santa Cruz Operation) sold their IP and Unix business to a company called Caldera -- who had already successfully sued Microsoft over the DR-DOS/Windows 95 lawsuit started back in the day by Digital Research, whose IP rights they'd purchased. Caldera were an also-ran Linux distributor who ran out of capital in the 1996-98 time frame (I forget precisely when) and pivoted into litigation. The Microsoft lawsuit victory gave them the money to buy the SCO IP and go after IBM, which turned out to be a Really Bad Idea because IBM's legal department back then made Microsoft's look like a teddy bear.
The original SCO changed their name (Tarantella? I think?) and were eventually absorbed by what was left of Borland.
Irony: I worked at (original, non-litigious, UNIX-developing) SCO circa 1991-95; if SCO's execs had their eye on the ball they could have rolled out their own Linux distro with a ton of valuable extras backported from Open Server and cleaned Red Hat's clock. But instead, despite half of the UNIX dev team moonlighting on open source projects, the official line was that Linux was an amateur-hour hobbyist project that nobody would ever pay for.
> But instead, despite half of the UNIX dev team moonlighting on open source projects, [...]
+1. The original SCO didn't have such a bad reputation. Quite a few Unix hackers worked here. It also had a big Unix conference, Linus Torvalds was an invited speaker.
The reputation damage caused by the rogue SCO to their former employees must be big.
Wasn't Unixware (under whatever name it was running in the given year) something of the go-to choice for proper Unix on x86 till Linux got more complete? I think ESR even maintained a how to on it.
That would make sense but this is the quote on their own website:
“While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property,” said Sean Snyder, President and CEO of Xinuos. “It is also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community, and innovation itself.”
Edit- unless you are saying their claim is that someone would rip off new code at this late a point in their dead branch of UNIX? That would be possible I guess, but they would have to be delusional to a point that strains credulity.
Things are confusing because Xinuos recently launched a brand new lawsuit against IBM and IBM owned RedHat. Xinuos' claims in that case are all about anti-competitive behavior and nothing about TSG's historical accusations of code theft and breach of contract.
I'd actually say the lawsuit is about Xinuos' failed business model:
* The infamous SCO vs Novell & IBM lawsuit soured everyone on SCO, so companies got their software off of OpenServer/UnixWare as quickly as they could.
* Those few who continue to use SCO products have existing OS & user licenses that will remain valid in perpetuity (or until the 2038 bug renders them unusable), and virtualization allows continued use of those old OSes on modern hardware without help from Xinuos.
* Their "V" (VMWare virtualization) releases amount to pre-installed disk drivers and small performance tweaks, and for that they switched to an annual subscription model that it seems nobody will buy-in to.
* Some of their releases like OpenServer 6 broke some backwards compatibility. Newer releases like OpenServer 10 are just rebadged FreeBSD with a bit of SCO legacy binary compatibility thrown-in.
* The ascendancy of Linux made SCO and Xinuos' expensive commercial OS products increasingly irrelevant before the IBM/Novell lawsuits, and only ever more so today.
No, it's not about Xinuos's code (if any). It's about rights to the property that they bought from SCO. That purchase lets Xinuos say "our", even though it's not theirs by authorship.
