6/18/2003 01:08:00 PM

Forbes.com: What SCO Wants, SCO Gets

...like many religious folk, the Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement are a) convinced of their own righteousness, and b) sure the whole world, including judges, will agree.

They should wake up. SCO may not be very good at making a profit by selling software. (Last year the company lost $24.9 million on sales of $64.2 million.) But it is very good at getting what it wants from other companies. And it has a tight circle of friends.

In 1996, SCO's predecessor company, Caldera, bought the rights to a decrepit version of the DOS operating system and used it to sue Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), eventually shaking a settlement out of the Redmond, Wash., software giant. In 1997, Darl McBride, now SCO's chief executive, sued his then employer, IKON Office Solutions (nyse: IKN - news - people ), and won a settlement that he says was worth multiple millions. (IKON acknowledges the settlement but disputes the amount.)

McBride joined Caldera as chief executive in June 2002. Two months later he changed the company's name to The SCO Group, based on the name of an ailing Unix product that Caldera had purchased in 2001 from its creator, The Santa Cruz Operation, of Santa Cruz, Calif. The Santa Cruz Operation now calls itself Tarantella (nasdaq: TTLDC - news - people ).

As with the 1996 DOS lawsuit against Microsoft, in the current lawsuit over Unix and Linux this company aims to take a nearly dead chunk of old code, bought for a song, and parlay it into a windfall. Not only is the strategy the same--so are some of the players.

i wondered aloud to Justin this morning if Torvalds's move from Transmeta to focus on the Linux kernal full-time was an attempt to ensure that there is a viable Linux codebase completely transitioned from SCO-actionable code.