Tarantella won't dance to SCO tune
Chief executive distances his company from SCO following legal wrangle with IBM and Novell
Tarantella chief executive Doug Michaels has moved to distance his company from SCO following the Unix vendor's legal wrangling with IBM and Novell (CRN, 19 May, 27 May).
"I want to be really clear that Tarantella has absolutely no relations with SCO," Michaels told CRN.
"We have no SCO shares, no common management apart from one of our board members, who happens to sit on SCO's board, and we have no involvement. As a result, my opinion [on the Unix battle] is irrelevant."
Peter Dawes, managing director of reseller LinuxIT, said the impact of the lawsuit on the UK would be minimal.
"This battle is of interest, but only as interesting as Hillary Clinton's memoirs to most of us in the UK. This thing has been blown out of proportion because of the superficial nature of business across the pond," he said.
But Michaels conceded that Tarantella executives, including himself, might be called as witnesses.
"There are contractual and IP issues to this lawsuit. AT&T created a complex licensing model that made things very complicated. The original SCO bought Unix from Novell to simplify things," he said.
Tarantella was originally a division of the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), of which Doug Michaels was chief executive.
After the UnixWare and OpenServer divisions were sold to Caldera, SCO changed its name to that of its sole surviving division: Tarantella. Caldera recently changed its name to SCO and halted Linux distribution.
"Linux has all the attributes that made Unix great," Michaels said. "I got involved in Unix in the first place because of the collaborative aspect of it."