SCO buyout leaves Monterey in doubt

Linux supplier Caldera's purchase of Santa Cruz Operation's Unix product line seems to bring the curtain down on SCO's Monterey collaboration with IBM.

Linux supplier Caldera's purchase of Santa Cruz Operation's (SCO) Unix product line seems to bring the curtain down on SCO's Monterey collaboration with IBM.

Caldera is buying SCO's server software division, which includes the UnixWare and OpenServer operating systems, as well as its professional services division. These two business units will be placed into a separate holding company, wholly owned by Caldera.

In exchange for these units, SCO will receive 28 per cent of Caldera, in the form of more than 17 million shares of Caldera stock, and $7 million in cash. SCO will now concentrate on its Tarantella application connectivity technology, which is not part of the deal.

The move has raised questions about the future of Monterey, which SCO founded with IBM in 1998 to make their Unix operating systems compatible.

"We have a legal obligation to IBM with Monterey, and we intend to move it forward aggressively," said Ransom Love, president and chief executive of Caldera.

IBM seems less certain, however. "Monterey itself was only ever intended to be a project name," said Rohan Fernando, IBM product manager for AIX.

Asked about his company's association with Caldera, he added: "At the moment, we don't know how this relationship is going to play out."

This week, IBM announced AIX 5L, the next version of its AIX operating system, which it is expecting to release this autumn.

While IBM claims AIX 5L demonstrates the success of Monterey, the new release is aimed squarely at the Linux community. IBM has made it easier to port Linux applications to AIX 5L.

"Monterey is perceived as a proprietary operating system, and the public wants Linux, which it sees as open," said Phil Payne, analyst at Isham Research.

Additional reporting by Cath Everett, vnunet.com