[olug] SCO Suspends Linux Activities (fwd)

Wed May 14 20:45:59 UTC 2003

FWIW - We were the first Caldera Authorized Partners in the Midwest region
back in 1995 or so... sigh. I even had the full Netware Server running on
COL 1.3.

I have personal friends who mostly had made the wrenching transition
through the Caldera purchase of SCO. I feel bad for them. Personally I
stopped caring last summer when Caldera went towards a closed distribution
model and reneged on their talk of enhancing the Linux kernel. Oh well -
so much for them.

--------------------------------------------------
Matthew G. Marsh,  President
Paktronix Systems LLC
1506 North 59th Street
Omaha  NE  68104
Phone: (402) 553-2288
Email: mgm at midwestlinux.com
WWW:  http://www.midwestlinux.com
--------------------------------------------------

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 13:15:20 -0700
From: TeamSCO Partner Program <TeamSCO at sco.rsc01.com>
Reply-To: TeamSCO Partner Program <partners at sco.com>
To: sales at paktronix.com
Subject: SCO Suspends Linux Activities

Dear SCO Partner:

As a SCO Partner, we thank you for your support and continued business.
Because you are a valued partner, it is important that we make you aware
of important SCO business decisions and announcements as soon as possible.
As such, we wanted to make you aware of an important announcement made
today.

This communication is about recent efforts SCO has made to license and
protect our patents, copyrights and intellectual property pertaining to
the UNIX(r) operating system.  As you know, on March 7, 2003 SCO announced
that it filed legal action against IBM in the State Court of Utah, for
misappropriation of trade secrets, tortuous interference, unfair
competition and breach of contract. The complaint alleged that IBM made
concentrated efforts to improperly destroy the economic value of UNIX,
particularly UNIX on Intel, to benefit IBM's new Linux services business.

As we have progressed in our discovery related to this action, SCO has
found compelling evidence that the Linux operating system contains
unauthorized SCO UNIX intellectual property (IP).  Due to this discovery,
we are taking three immediate courses of action.

1 - The first is to send a letter alerting commercial users to the fact
that legal liability for the use of Linux by businesses may extend to end
users. Customers should start receiving this letter today. For your
information, a copy of this letter may be found at:
http://www.sco.com/scosource/letter_to_linux_customers.html

2 - The second action we are taking is to suspend all future sales of the
Linux operating system from SCO until the attendant risks with Linux are
better understood and properly resolved.

3 - Finally, although this action affects future development and sales of
SCO's Linux offerings, SCO will continue to support our SCO Linux and
OpenLinux customers and partners who have previously implemented those
products and we will hold them harmless from any SCO intellectual property
issues regarding Linux. SCO will continue to honor all contractual
obligations with existing customers including product updates, service,
and support.

As many of you are already aware, SCO UNIX systems continue to sell well -
including an increase in OpenServer sales over the previous quarter. Our
UNIX products continue to support many of the world's largest businesses.
In addition, new customer sales indicate that there is still no better
option for rock-solid, dependable technology for their core businesses
than our SCO UNIX solutions.

We are excited to be building on our SCO UNIX history as we roll out our
next generation UNIX operating system and SCOx framework this fall. SCOx
will allow small and medium business customers and branch offices to plug
their existing applications into a Web services environment. Details of
this strategy will be unveiled at SCO Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, August
17-19. (For more details, see: http://www.sco.com/2003forum ).

SCO remains committed to building new business opportunities for our
partners such as you. We recognize that you have depended on us to provide
reliable, solid technologies for your customers for over twenty years. We
look forward to helping you and your customers meet your business needs
for the next twenty years.

Sincerely,

Darl McBride
President and CEO
The SCO Group

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