Comment by robotelvis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robotelvis | Hacker News Reader

I was actually the "author" of one of the pieces of code that SCO claimed had been stolen from them - SCO's implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter.

SCO had a collaboration with IBM called Project Monterey, in which SCO and IBM were merging their operating systems in order to be better positioned for IA64 (which at that point people still thought would be good).

One minor detail of the Monterey deal was that SCO got the right to port IBM's superior networking stack into SCO's operating systems. One part of IBM's networking stack was their implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter, and that was one of the parts I ported over (I'm pretty sure the file still had a BSD copyright notice on it).

That was back in the days when SCO was a cool UNIX vendor that thought of itself as an extension of UC Santa Cruz. Back then employees couldn't really imagine it turning evil, and it made me wary of what my subsequent employers (Google and Facebook) could turn into.

SCO the "cool UNIX vendor" was not the company that sued. In 2001, the cool UNIX vendor was struggling and sold its UNIX business to Caldera. Caldera renamed itself "the SCO Group" and filed the lawsuit. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation

I remember seeing original SCO unix in our server room in 1998 - they were a legitimate player then but I also remember seeing all new orders going for SunOS (and later for Sun Solaris).

Internally, SCO used to joke that they were “the most popular operating system you haven’t heard of”.

It was (at that time) the best Unix on cheap x86 hardware, so it was deployed everywhere. In gas station pumps, in cash registers, in ATMs, in back office databases. I think SCO made up the majority of Oracle database instances.

Most people interacted with SCO code on a daily basis but didn’t know.

Of course they rapidly lost the x86 UNIX crown to Linux. At the time I was there SCO could still do a lot of stuff well that Linux couldn’t, but the advantages were rapidly going down and the writing was on the wall.

In my mind, I associate Caldera with that Linux distribution that was pretty OK, but nothing to write home about.

Caldera’s big trick IIRC was its installer. You could play Tetris in the installer while it copied packages onto the hard drive. It was also a better installer for new users than a lot of others. I think the desktop experience was pretty polished for the time, too.

That's brilliant! I wish more installers did that.

They also had Minesweeper too (I can't remember if it was a choice, or they had two distro flavors - one with Tetris and one with Minesweeper).

Caldera, pre SCO, was actually pretty sold 'professional' desktop OS. A place I worked at used it and we had a bunch of developers and researchers with Windows backgrounds that were using Linux for the first time and they all found it a pretty smooth and polished desktop and development experience over all.

Let's not forget the following [0]:

> SCO's Linux lawsuit made no sense and no one at the time gave it much of a chance of succeeding. Over time it was revealed that Microsoft had been using SCO as a sock puppet against Linux. Unfortunately for Microsoft and SCO, it soon became abundantly clear that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux and its allies.

In a way this was a proxy war of Microsoft vs Linux.

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[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sco-linux-fud-returns-from-the...

Microsoft is very very American.

The original SCO wasn't particularly cool either, I worked for a competing company that got called in to help them when they couldn't get get the 286 MMU to work, the deal was that we would get a copy of the resulting code, we got it working but in the end got zilch

I can’t speak to what it was like to work with them from the outside, but (at least when I was there) they definitely had a fun internal culture.

Small enough to not have a “big company” feel, yet profitable enough (at that time) to not have “startup panic”. Plus lots of cool hackers, including some of the original authors of UNIX, who had joined through the AT&T deal.

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