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Who is The Santa Cruz Operation®?

SCO is synonymous with evil old school unix. A lot of mainframes ran it, and my first job was dealing with some old SCO/ATT bastardized system. Interestingly enough, I never bothered to know what SCO stood for until now.

> SCO is synonymous with evil old school unix.

The full name Santa Cruz Operation only refers to the original SCO company (which sold itself in 2001), not the SCO Group which purchased SCO and turned its name into a dirty word. Unlike the SCO Group, the original SCO was old-school commercial Unix, but it didn't have such a bad reputation. Quite a few hackers in the Unix world worked with the original SCO.

Thanks for the history, seriously interesting! My interaction was shortly after 2001, but on an ancient system. Guessing it had some parts from both histories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation

It's important to clarify that the SCO Group in the Linux disputes was not the original Santa Cruz Operation, Santa Cruz Operation sold all Unix business to Caldera Systems in 2001, and it was Caldera Systems's CEO who started a bunch of lawsuits, suing everyone, Red Hat, and various Linux users, they even sued Novell for the Unix trademark, and obviously got a notorious reputation and turned SCO into a dirty world. And of course, it almost lost all cases and turned SCO as a company into an utter piece of garbage.

Seriously, what was the CEO thinking about?! I guess Caldera Systems purchased SCO and they suddenly found the days of commercial proprietary Unix were ending and the purchase was a mistake, and this is how they started its assaults.

Unlike the SCO Group, the original SCO didn't have such a bad reputation. Quite a few hackers in the Unix world worked with the original SCO. Also it used to hold a Unix conference, speakers included Linus Torvalds.

Ah, the poetry of naming a company after a hole in the ground.

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