Guild Companies

It's been a busy couple of days in the commercial Linux distributor business. First, Turbolinux announced last week that it has sold that Linux business to Software Research Associates, one of the oldest software developers in Japan. Then early this week Caldera International, the merger between Linux distributor Caldera and the former Unix operating system provider Santa Cruz Operation, announced that it was changing its name to The SCO Group and presumably moving some of its focus back to Unix.

Turbolinux is important to a number of the big server vendors because it is one of the versions that they sell and support on their Intel-based and other types of servers. IBM, for instance, pushes the Turbolinux version of Linux on its zSeries mainframes and iSeries midrange machines. SRA says that it will retain the Turbolinux company name and brand and that it is moving the company's headquarters back to Japan. Turbolinux only recently moved to Silicon Valley to try to do a better job breaking into the North American market selling Linux licenses. SRA says that it is committed to TurboLinux and the new UnitedLinux consortium that SuSE, Caldera, and Conectiva formed with Turbolinux in July to help spread the cost of development for commercial-grade Linux.

The former Caldera has also thrown its weight behind the UnitedLinux edition of Linux to create a development organization and a single marketing message that can compete against the market leader in commercial Linux, Red Hat. While the newly rechristened SCO Group is not abandoning Linux, the new company and its new CEO, Darl McBride, wants to tap into the SCO brand to make it easier for SCO's resellers and its own sales people to get their foot in the door to sell either the OpenServer or UnixWare variants of Unix developed by SCO or the Linux distribution created by Caldera. People know who SCO is--or was--and hardly anyone knows who Caldera is, and if they think really hard they might remember that it was established with some seed money by Novell founder Ray Noorda when Linux started to take off in the mid-1990s. Caldera is clearly the number four vendor in a ten horse race when it comes to commercial Linux, which is why it wants to leverage the SCO brand to try to sell against Red Hat and indeed its other UnitedLinux partners in many cases. OpenServer is still selling, and SCO would be stupid not to sell it, regardless of the organization's desire to be a Linux big shot.

SCO Group says that it will revitalize the Linux runtime environment with UnixWare for companies who want to use both operating systems for their applications (SCO was the original developer of the lxrun runtime for Intel-based servers). The company will also sell SCO Linux 4.0, which will be based on the UnitedLinux distribution of Linux, which went into closed beta a few weeks ago and is expected to go into open beta sometime in September. SCO Linux 4.0 is expected to be available in November.

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