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More on Project Monterey - 2002 The Register Article on Caldera's Plans
Wednesday, May 11 2005 @ 09:46 PM EDT

Yahoo poster truth_in_government gets the credit for this find, a July 2002 article in The Register, " Caldera backs away from 64-bit Open Unix."

Some excerpts, with highlights in red:

As the legacy Unix variant, OpenServer was never likely to be ported to Itanium, but sizable investment has gone in to projects to develop a 64-bit version of Open Unix, both with IBM on the Monterey project and through SCO's Gemini project that created UnixWare 7, the predecessor to the current Open Unix 8. Feedback from Intel and customers, however, has led Caldera to the conclusion that there is enough life in the 32-bit market.

"The feedback from Intel and our customers is that 64-bit addressing today just isn't a priority, and the 32-bit processors are just getting better and better," said Caldera's VP EMEA, Chris Flynn. "32-bit is good enough for most people's processing requirements." That appears to suggest that Open Unix and OpenServer's lifespan will last only as long as 32-bit processors continue to sell, but Flynn maintained that the operating systems will remain available as long as customers want them.

"There's plenty of mileage in 32-bit Unix," he said. "Until our customers tell us that they don't want Unix and they don't want 32-bit Intel any more, which I don't see happening, then nothing's going to change. 32-bit is just great for customers over the next few years, but we do have choices, and we could move forward with our 64-bit projects.

One of those choices will be 64-bit Linux, which is being developed through the IA-64 Linux Project, and will be available from Caldera. Flynn believes that by the time users are looking to purchase 64-bit servers and operating systems in volume, Linux will have gained the robustness and scalability it requires to compete with Unix in the enterprise market.

Another option Caldera has on the shelf is IBM's AIX 5L, which was developed from the Monterey project between IBM and SCO. In 2001, Caldera offered a preview of the AIX 5L operating system for Itanium to developers, and it remains a possibility that Caldera will offer IBM's Unix for 64-bit users should there be the demand.


  


More on Project Monterey - 2002 The Register Article on Caldera's Plans | 168 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
I hear chickens coming home to roost...
Authored by: drichards1953 on Wednesday, May 11 2005 @ 09:57 PM EDT
and Colonel Sanders is hanging out in the yard!

---
Dennis

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety.
---Benjamin Franklin

[ Reply to This | # ]

Corrections Here
Authored by: sappha58 on Wednesday, May 11 2005 @ 10:01 PM EDT
...so PJ can find them.

Oooooo - I get to post this one! *blush*

[ Reply to This | # ]

Caldera's plans
Authored by: sinkemlow on Wednesday, May 11 2005 @ 10:04 PM EDT
So according to this, Caldera's plans were also to migrate from UNIX to
gnu/linux as soon as it was "ready" for primetime. UNIX was something
to hang on to "as long as customers want it."

[ Reply to This | # ]

"Should there be a demand from user's"
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 11 2005 @ 10:10 PM EDT

Another option Caldera has on the shelf is IBM's AIX 5L, which was developed from the Monterey project between IBM and SCO. In 2001, Caldera offered a preview of the AIX 5L operating system for Itanium to developers, and it remains a possibility that Caldera will offer IBM's Unix for 64-bit users should there be the demand.

What company in its right mind continues on a path which is of little interest to users? No-one wanted the Monterey product even 6 months after Darl took over. He couldn't sell it, so he sued.

IMHO the real killer blow to 64bit Unix is strongly related to Intels wrong decision on Itanium, otherwise known as the Itanic since the end of the last century.

Brian S.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Off-Topic Thread Starts Here
Authored by: Weeble on Wednesday, May 11 2005 @ 10:13 PM EDT
Not that y'all will post all off-topic messages here, anyway...

But while you're at it, please make sure that you post links in this format:

<a href="http://www.example.com/">CLICK ME</a>

Also; set the posting format to "HTML Formatted, and click
"Preview" and check your links before hitting "Submit
Comment."

The management and your fellow Groklovians will be very appreciative.

---
You Never Know What You're Going to Learn--or Learn About--on Groklaw!
(NOTE: Copying Permissions Are Stated in My Profile Bio)

[ Reply to This | # ]

IBM's AIX5L - Caldera Option
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 11 2005 @ 10:25 PM EDT

The title says it all, that is a Gem!

RS

[ Reply to This | # ]

Small guys and Big guys paying for someone else's mistake.
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 11 2005 @ 10:31 PM EDT

Monterey was relying on a successfull Intel 64 bit platform. I don't know when the papers were signed but Monterey was dreamt up at the time of Merced.

When Intel announced around the turn of the century that there would be no backward compatibily with Itanium, it seemed to me that the whole world came to understand the mistake that Intel was making, hence the chip's nickname.

It wasn't just IBM and SCO who had to rethink plans, whole swathes of the industry did. IMHO Intel were pushed into that wrong decision by M$ but that's another story.Gradually across the years 2000/2001 companies adjusted their directions and as we have recently witnessed, very few of those plans involved the Itanic.

IBM and SCOG were no different, they'd just wasted 2 years following the Intel decision.

IBM had accepted their loss of effort and SCOG should have accepted their loss of effort. I've no doubt that IBM lost a great deal more money than did SCOG, it was just IBM had other strings to their bow whilst SCOG apparently only had lawyers.

Brian S.

[ Reply to This | # ]

A priori 5p mistakes?
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 12:02 AM EDT
Disclaimer: IANAGG (.. A Groklaw Guru)

Wow. Talk about a 5P situation (Prior Planning..)

I am
Just an Obnoxious Twit

[ Reply to This | # ]

So- Caldera fired on all cylinders for LINUX and not UNIX or Monterey anything...
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 12:23 AM EDT
If IBM were looking to forward AIX5L then Caldera's level of commitment, by
putting it on the back burner, with no real effort to move to it... would have
said to everyone that LINUX was the way to go.

Sounds like an Estoppel moment to me, does it do it for you too?

[ Reply to This | # ]

More on Project Monterey - 2002 The Register Article on Caldera's Plans
Authored by: tbogart on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 02:17 AM EDT
"One of those choices will be 64-bit Linux, which is being developed
through the IA-64 Linux Project"

Forgetting, once again, that Linux was 64 bit on the Alpha years before ....
just points out how clueless VP's can be, I guess.

Sigh.

[ Reply to This | # ]

More on Project Monterey - 2002 The Register Article on Caldera's Plans
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 02:25 AM EDT
"The feedback from Intel and our customers is that 64-bit addressing today just isn't a priority, and the 32-bit processors are just getting better and better," said Caldera's VP EMEA, Chris Flynn. "32-bit is good enough for most people's processing requirements."

This was basically what Intel was saying at the time, that almost nobody needed 64bit procesors, that 32 bit were ok for long time to come, etc. Almost same words!!! Caldera really bought it from Intel!!!, to the point that Caldera drop 64bit development.
Genius at max, driven by a marketing pitch :(

This shows us the great vision that Caldera had at the time. Could not see their company going down the drain.


Ivan

[ Reply to This | # ]

the finds keep a-coming!
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 02:43 AM EDT
no wonder SCO fears Groklaw so!

[ Reply to This | # ]

How does this affect the case?
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 03:52 AM EDT
So educate me.

This seems to be mainly speculation on what 64-bit UNIX (or Linux) option
Caldera was likely to take (if any). It mentions in passing - as more or less
"common knowledge" at the time - that there was a joint project
between
Caldera and IBM called Project Monterey, with a sub-project called AIX5L
which had something to do with 64-bit UNIX.

So here are my questions:

1) What is damaging in this to SCO's arguments? Which of SCO's or IBM's
claims (possibly including the new one that SCO wants to add) does this
provide evidence for or against?

2) Does the fact that something is or was "common knowledge" in any
way
shift the legal burden of proof in a court for people arguing that (a) it *is*
true, or (b) it *isn't* true?

Rick

[ Reply to This | # ]

Monterey & Summit 3D
Authored by: atul on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 04:31 AM EDT
Many people don't realize that Monterey was OldSCO's *second* go at Unix- on-Itanium. The first was the oddly-named "Summit 3D" project, a joint venture between OldSCO and HP. Which is a partnership that makes a lot of sense; HP co-developed the Itanium architecture, so they'd be the obvious choice as someone to partner with. For whatever reason, Summit 3D, a.k.a. 3DA, didn't work out, so OldSCO ended up partnering with IBM instead, after much of the Itanium work was apparently done already. Meanwhile, HP turned around and ported HP-UX to Itanium on their own, with SCO getting no credit or revenue from the resulting product. (So maybe SCO should sue *them* too?)

We don't really know whether any of the jointly-developed Summit 3D code made it into the Itanium version of HP-UX, *or* into Monterey, and maybe we never will. However, SCO's been insisting they were completely helpless w.r.t. Itanium once IBM bailed on them, and the Summit stuff indicates this is manifestly untrue. If they had an OS that was close to being done before IBM came on board, it's hard to see how IBM quitting Monterey could've harmed SCO very much. They lost a big marketing partner, but that's about all. The article at the center of the current GL story seems to indicate that SCO/Caldera retained the right to go ahead and launch Monterey without IBM's involvement, and they elected not to do so for marketing reasons.

Here's an early (=1996) story about S un's take on the HP- OldSCO tieup.

The funny thing is that UnixWare for Itanium was close to being done at one point, and SCO had all sorts of partners on board to help make it the industry standard Unix on Itanium. You'd think it wouldn't have been that hard to put the finishing touches on it sometime in the last 6+ years, if it was really as crucial to SCO's future as they're claiming in the IBM suit.

Here's another article from earlier in 1998, which mentions that there was a wo rking version of the HP+SCO operating system running in a lab at Intel at that point.

[ Reply to This | # ]

More on Project Monterey - 2002 The Register Article on Caldera's Plans
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 06:02 AM EDT
Dear Pamela.

At some point in time, Caldera (or successor) suddenly converted from being a
Linux supporter to being a Linux enemy.

Can this be related to any one person joining the company, and if so, who, when,
and who sent him ?

Just a suggestion for chronological research !

Cordial best wishes,

Geoff Bagley.
Debian user.

[ Reply to This | # ]

More on Project Monterey - 2002 The Register Article on Caldera's Plans
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 06:11 AM EDT
Thanks to atul for the pointers to Summit 3D:

here are some links (plaintext) from the Wayback Machine:
(be careful when reassembling these)

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223223231/www.hp.com/computing/next_genunix/96fe
b14c.html

It mentions a session at UniForum -- perhaps someone who
attended it can recall details of the presentation.

"HP and SCO will ensure application, data and hardware
compatibility with existing HP-UX and SCO UnixWare and SCO
OpenServer systems."

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223223221/www.hp.com/computing/next_genunix/96au
g12b.html

"The HP/SCO UNIX systems will be designed and implemented
specifically for the Intel IA-64 Merced processor...."

"SCO plans to support this API specification in its
upcoming release of "Gemini," the consolidation of SCO
OpenServer and SCO UnixWare, which is expected to be
available in mid-1997."

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223223211/www.hp.com/computing/next_genunix/96oc
t8.html

This contains an series of blurbs from people at Siemens,
Fujitsu and Oracle. NEC's representative claims that

"NEC is pleased to be working with HP and SCO to review
and provide input on these APIs, and we are already
working to incorporate them into our
operating-system-development efforts...."

Does anyone know what became of those efforts?

The most fascinating part is here:

"A matrix-format summary of information about the APIs --
listing the APIs, their origin and the standards they
support -- is available on the companies' World Wide Web
sites: /go/3dunix for HP and http://www.sco.com for SCO."

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223223329/www.hp.com/computing/next_genunix/fact
s.html

3. "This new technology will incorporate the best
technologies from HP-UX, SCO UnixWare, Novell NetWare
File, Print and Directory services, Distributed Computing
Environment (DCE) technology and other leading
technologies from OEMs."

Does anyone know how Novell figured into this plan?

4. "Development facilities have been set up in New Jersey
and are currently staffed with over 220 UNIX
professionals."

I'd like to know the numbers of HP and SCO programmers,
respectively -- interesting that the blurb did not specify
"programmers" alone.

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223223337/www.hp.com/computing/next_genunix/faq.
html

The FAQ. Fully Buzzword Compliant.

"3DA is an advanced, modular, three-dimensional
architecture which will enable system designers and
application developers unprecedented flexibility and
innovation in developing system solutions.

The first
dimension, modular functionality, separates the core
operating system into basic building blocks, such as
scheduler, memory management and file system, through
well-defined internal interfaces. This modularity allows
innovation, yet ensures reliability because system
designers can modify or replace a module without affecting
other modules in the system.

The second dimension,
processor optimization, enables system designers to take
full advantage of all of a processor's features. Today,
most operating systems are unable to fully exploit the
wealth of new features that microprocessor chip sets
offer. 3DA's second dimension allows the operating system
to take full advantage of all of a processor's features
and to be quickly tuned to run on different chip sets.

The
third dimension, system optimization, enables system
designers to extend and tailor the functional modules,
from the first dimension, to support specialized system
topologies, such as NUMA, loosely-coupled clusters or
massively parallel architectures. System optimization
provides increased scalability and performance while
maintaining application compatibility."

So: whence would come this NUMA capability ?

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223223345/www.hp.com/computing/next_genunix/whpp
r.html

The detailed white paper. Of note:

"The distributed architecture will be CORBA-based and will
be able to integrate with Microsoft networked OLE when it
ships. "

"Role based administration so there is no "Root see/get
all" data"

It's was a remarkably ambitious plan (worth reading
through for comparison/contrast with current and past
SCO and IBM (and HP) offerings).

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223223406/www.hp.com/computing/next_genunix/indu
stry.html

From June 1996:

"Has Hewlett-Packard lost its collective mind?"

"It seems like HP is abandoning both its highly successful
PA-RISC microprocessor family and its HP-UX variant of
UNIX."

To the point:

"Last year, Novell, SCO, and HP announced that Novell
would transfer UNIX to SCO, and SCO and HP would lead the
charge toward 64-bit UNIX (see this column in the January
1996 issue, p. 9)."

"This HP-SCO effort would lead to a merged operating
system available from both vendors."

Technically,

"HP is saying clearly that customers no longer care which
kernel is used and that they will use a best-of-breed
approach (a signal that they intend to keep some
SVR3-based parts of HP-UX and SCO OpenServer)."

SVR3, eh ? From which sources under what documents?
Further down the page:

"The HP-SCO operating system may not be the be all of
UNIX, but it has created a legitimate franchise, has
shared costs, and has erased the "old, stale SVR3" label
from HP's operating system."

Interestingly,

"Other vendors also endorsed the effort, but only for
their Intel-based systems. Included in this category are
DEC, ICL, and IBM."

The document was NOT an original HP nor SCO product,
but came from the pen of an outsider:

Written by Norton Greenfeld, President of Implements Inc.
(Wayland, MA). He can be reached by e-mail at
ngreenfeld@implements.com.

This article is posted with permission from UNIX REVIEW,
June 1996, © 1996 MILLER FREEMAN INC. All Rights Reserved

There's also a PDF available from the Wayback Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223223354/http://www.hp.com:80/computing/next_ge
nunix/files/api.pdf

A note indicates that the "Gemini" portion

"includes SCO UnixWare APIs, SCO OpenServer APIs are
currently under review"

[ Reply to This | # ]

Story was on GL once before...
Authored by: atul on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 06:25 AM EDT
...way back in August 2003.

Meanwhile, Chris Flynn (the Caldera guy quoted in the article) has moved on, and no longer works for SCO, Old or New. He's mentioned as working for OldSCO; I imagine he went from OldSCO to Caldera when OpenServer changed hands, and it looks like he got out entirely in October 2003. So there's probably nothing standing in the way of IBM asking him a few questions, now is there?

[ Reply to This | # ]

More on Project Monterey - 2002 The Register Article on Caldera's Plans
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 09:31 AM EDT
TechWeb: IBM Unveils Linux Plans For Intel's Monterey Aug 2000

The Register: Double-spinning Caldera faces open source backlash Aug 2000

eWeek: Ransom Love, Co-founder of Caldera and SCO, Speaks of Unix, GPL and the Lawsuit
I know this is old, but is refreshing to read now. Watch for perspective

eWeek: Gotta Make the In-Laws Happy

Caldera CEO Ransom Love's strategy, previewed at CeBit in Germany last month, is fairly simple.The company is embedding Linux features into Unix, and vice versa. At the same time, Caldera continues to enhance and refine OpenLinux, UnixWare (to be known as OpenUnix) and perhaps even OpenServer. Version 8 of OpenUnix went into beta this month.

eWeek: United They Stand; United They Fall

RE: UnitedLinux It is clear, based on past conversations with Love, that proprietary intellectual property will be added to the distributions. This intellectual property will surely be enhanced further by IBM, HP, SAP and Intel—four UnitedLinux backers that have been struggling to find ways of getting patented technology into the mainly open-source Linux distributions.

By the way, I found someone who knows PJ!

Oh, and by the way, Pamela Jones really does exist. I've met her. - SVN

griff5w

[ Reply to This | # ]

More on Project Monterey - 2002 The Register Article on Caldera's Plans
Authored by: pooky on Thursday, May 12 2005 @ 11:15 AM EDT
I find it very interesting that now Ransome Love is coming back and saying IBM
did Caldera wrong, when it seems clear that Caldera itself was beginning to back
away from the project. I don't claim to know the details involved in the breakup
of Monterrey, but it seems clear now that it was likely not just IBM who didn't
see a future for UNIX on IA64.

-pooky

---
Many Bothans died to bring us this information.

[ Reply to This | # ]

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