Is Caldera moving away from Linux?
Published: 28 Aug 2002 13:56 BST
When Linux vendor Caldera announced it would change its name to SCO Group, it prompted doubts that the company might be shifting its focus from Linux to Unix.
The company owns several key versions of Unix and makes the majority of its profits from commercial Unix versions, instead of the opensource Linux operating system. The change of name, to one of the best known commercial Unix brands, came weeks after the appointment of a new chief executive, Darl McBride, from outside the opensource community.
However, Caldera is still a member of the UnitedLinux effort to provide a common Linux platform, and has been at pains, since the name change, to emphasise the continued role of Linux in its plans.
Just days before the name change was announced, Tech Update sat down with Darl McBride at the LinuxWorld event. He agreed that Unix is the strongest financial part of Caldera's business, but still had plenty to say about Linux.
What's your main focus as the new CEO for Caldera?
The first four weeks on the job I've spent a lot of time looking for value points, leverage points, if you will, in terms of "what do we do with this company." I just sent out a letter to shareholders a couple of days ago -- I won't bore you with all the details -- but there are a couple of interesting things in there that I found out about Caldera that I didn't know before. One, the intellectual properties that we hold -- we own SVRx, UnixWare, SCO Unix -- in terms of the Unix timeline, the thread that runs through the middle of these is really SVRx. All of the subsequent Unix licensing that happened broke off from that. We own all that intellectual property and have relationships with a lot of vendors. If people want to come and see the original HP-UX source code, they come to us. We get several dozen requests a month just to come in and see AIX or HP-UX code base. And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++. It was interesting to see the depth of Caldera's intellectual capital.
In terms of dealing with a company that has Unix and Linux in part of its portfolio, we're a lot more substantial than your run-of-the-mill, startup distribution company trying to figure out how to make it work with Linux. We've been around a long time. And the interesting thing is that our revenues have really stabilised -- in fact, this last quarter we saw revenues go up for the first time in several quarters. We're in a much better situation than a lot of people would seem to believe.
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