In 1994, Caldera Inc. was formed by Bryan Sparks and Ransom Love with the financial backing of Novell Inc. founder Ray Noorda. The company was one of the first backers of commercial Linux. Since that time, Caldera's successor company, The SCO Group Inc., has gained notoriety for its legal actions against Linux vendors and end users over what it says is proprietary Unix code. When he left Caldera in mid-2001, industry wags said Love would take the helm of the UnitedLinux consortium; but instead, he left the Linux business. Today, Love is writing a book about the early days of Linux commercialization and the open-source way of approaching problems.
eWEEK.com: Let's cut to the chase: What did you intend to do with the Unix source code?
Love: Clearly, when we acquired SCO and Unix, our intention was to see how Unix could expand and extend Linux. In a lot of
technologies, Linux was going in slightly different ways, but we thought Unix
was the natural companion to it.
We took the Linux code that was available and learned to cleanly match it with
the Unix APIs. The idea was to adopt Linux APIs and mechanisms to function on
top of a scalable Unix code designed for SMP [symmetric multiprocessing]. At the
time, Linux was moving to clustering to make Linux more scalable. We wanted to
combine Unix's improved symmetric multiprocessing with Linux so that it would
have both excellent clustering and SMP.
Indeed, at first we wanted to open-source all of Unix's code, but we quickly
found that even though we owned it, it was, and still is, full of other companies'
copyrights.
The challenge was that there were a lot of business entities that didn't want
this to happen. Intel [Corp.] was the biggest opposition.
