The Santa Cruz Operation

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~ the last words ~

SCO was a consultancy before it was anything else. Larry Michels started it in Santa Cruz in 1979 with his son Doug, doing contract Unix work for other people's hardware, and it stayed small and profitable doing that for several years. The pivot came in 1981 when it started porting Xenix, the Unix that Microsoft had licensed from AT&T and could not legally call Unix, onto Intel machines. A joint development agreement with Microsoft followed in 1982.

That was the bet, and it was the right one for about fifteen years. Everybody else selling Unix in the 1980s sold it welded to their own expensive hardware, so buying Unix meant buying a Sun or an SGI. SCO sold the operating system on its own, for boxes anybody could already buy, at a price a small business could sign off on. Microsoft took a minority stake in February 1989 and a board seat, having decided its own future was OS/2 and then Windows, and handed the Xenix line over.

Those customers were not developers or universities. They were car dealerships and pharmacies, running a point of sale system or an accounting package on a machine in a back room, and they bought support contracts and stayed for a decade. Revenue peaked at $224 million in 1999. Then a free Unix appeared that ran on the same hardware, and the entire proposition, a paid operating system for commodity Intel boxes, stopped being a proposition at all.

SCO announced on 2 August 2000 that it would sell its server software and professional services divisions to Caldera Systems. The deal closed on 7 May 2001, and Caldera International was created as a holding company to receive it. What Caldera bought included the SCO name, and what was left behind renamed itself Tarantella, Inc. after the one product it kept.

~ the record ~

~ sixty five percent ~

By mid-1993 SCO held about sixty five percent of the Unix-on-Intel market, had shipped something like 350,000 copies of Xenix by 1989 alone, and reached an installed base of a million systems in the mid-1990s. Those numbers made it, by units rather than by revenue, the largest Unix vendor in the world for most of a decade. Almost nobody thought of it that way, because the machines sat in back offices running a single application for people who never saw a command line.

~ selling your own name ~

The name transfer is the part that produces permanent confusion, and it is worth being precise about. Caldera Systems was a Linux distributor funded by Ray Noorda. It bought the SCO business in 2001 and became Caldera International, then renamed itself The SCO Group in August 2002. In March 2003 that company sued IBM for a billion dollars over Unix copyrights and sent demand letters to fifteen hundred corporations. For a few years afterward it was the most disliked company in the free software world.

None of the people who built the Santa Cruz Operation were involved in any of it. They were at Tarantella, in the same town, selling remote access software. The litigation was conducted under their name by a company they had sold to, over copyrights a judge ruled in August 2007 had belonged to Novell the whole time and had never been SCO's to sell.

The Michels family had spent twenty two years building a reputation for being the approachable Unix vendor, the one with a conference on the beach that customers actually enjoyed attending. That reputation was an asset on the balance sheet and it transferred with the trademark, and search results for the name have been about the lawsuit ever since.

~ what tarantella was ~

Tarantella shipped in 1997 and it was ahead of its time by roughly a decade: server software that took an application running on a Unix or Windows machine and delivered its interface to a web browser, so a user needed nothing installed. That is a description of Citrix, and eventually of half of what the word cloud came to mean. It was correct and it was early, without the sales force to make either one count.

Sun Microsystems bought Tarantella in 2005 for about $25 million, and Oracle absorbed that when it bought Sun. The OpenServer customers, meanwhile, outlived everybody. There are still machines in service running a Unix descended from a Microsoft license from 1981, maintained now by a successor company that bought the assets out of the bankruptcy. That is a long service life for software that was only ever supposed to run a till.

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