Xinuos

The SCO Group (SCO) was a Utah-based software company that had over time acquired the operating system products SCO OpenServer and UnixWare, which dated back to earlier companies The Santa Cruz Operation and Unix System Laboratories and to the early history of Unix before that. But by the late 1990s these products found themselves losing in the marketplace, first to Microsoft's Windows NT and Windows Server line and then to open source Linux. In 2007 SCO suffered a major adverse ruling in the SCO v. Novell case that rejected SCO's claim of ownership of Unix-related copyrights and undermined much of the rest of its legal position. ==Origins==

The interest of Stephen Norris Capital Partners in the SCO Group started in February 2008, when it put forward a $100 million reorganization and debt financing plan for the company, which it would then take private. Stephen L. Norris had been a co-founder of the large and well-known private equity firm The Carlyle Group. There was also an unnamed Middle East partner in the proposed deal; the Associated Press reported that Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia was involved. But after a couple of months of due diligence investigation of SCO's operations, finances, and legal situation, Stephen Norris Capital Partners considered a different course of action, instead proposing to purchase SCO assets outright. Norris appeared on stage at the SCO Tec Forum 2008 company developer and partner conference in Las Vegas in October 2008, where possible acquisition and investments plans were shown to attendees. Neither of those plans went forward, That plan, too, did not move forward. In April 2010, SCO's mobility software assets were sold to its former CEO, Darl McBride, for $100,000. In September 2010 the SCO Group put up the remainder of its non-lawsuit assets for public auction. Thus in February 2011, another proposal was made, this time for $600,000, with this iteration of UnXis being backed by Norris, MerchantBridge, and Gerson Global Advisors. Some industry analysts were unsure of why Norris and his partners wished to acquire the SCO Unix software assets in the first place. In 2008 Ryan Paul of Ars Technica noted that "UnixWare, SCO's flagship product, hasn't seen a new release in four years." in 2011 called UnXis an "odd venture" which had "been offering to buy SCO since mid-2009 for reasons that aren't patently obvious to anybody." But in any case, the bankruptcy court approved this proposal, as the only other bid submitted was for $18. ==UnXis==

The sale was closed on 11 April 2011, with Stephen Norris Capital Partners and MerchantBridge being the final buyers, and UnXis was formed in substance. (O'Gara reported that MerchantBridge had 25 percent ownership of UnXis and Gulf Capital Partners had another 25 percent. It also took over some service contracts for existing SCO Group customers; It would be up to UnXis to hire SCO Group employees, of whom only handfuls were still left at various locations. Indeed, UnXis would be indemnified from any legal costs of ongoing litigation. Its CEO was Richard Bolandz, Bolandz said quarterly updates of the SCO products would be forthcoming, and its President was Sean Snyder. ==Xinuos==

In June 2013, the company changed its name to Xinuos. The SCO Group lawsuit against IBM was again alive in the courts, but Xinuos reiterated that it was not involved: "Since the sale of assets was completed [in 2011], we have had no further dealings with The SCO Group and have no knowledge regarding any legal action nor do we have any interest whatsoever in such proceedings." Instead, Snyder emphasized that, "The negativity directed as SCO was directed at management not at the products themselves. It's an overstatement to say the products were beloved, but not by much." Besides San Mateo, the company had additional facilities in Berkeley, California, Florham Park, New Jersey, Bad Homburg, Germany, and Tokyo, Japan. The initially-talked-about investments in the existing SCO products did not materialize, as by 2013 the company decided that they had been neglected too long and the cost of upgrading was too high. It then had its general availability release as OpenServer 10 in January 2016. The FreeBSD base gave a 64-bit operating system with modern capabilities, and Xinuos adopted the open source model of the license being free and the company trying to make money from superior offerings in technical support, product maintenance, and professional services. These definitive operating system instances could run as an entity within Open Server 10, In December 2017, Xinuos released "Definitive 2018" versions of OpenServer 6 and UnixWare 7. This was followed in October 2018 by the release of a "Definitive 2018" version of OpenServer 5. Some longtime SCO add-on products, such as Microlite's BackupEDGE backup/restore offering, kept their product up-to-date with the "Definitive" versions. So too did the iXorg reseller association, which continued throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s to discuss and test the latest Xinuos OS products during its regular meetings. In May 2019, Xinuos moved its operations to the United States Virgin Islands, locating itself as a tenant in the University of the Virgin Islands Research and Technology Park in Saint Croix. The Open Server 10 product disappeared from the Xinuos website during the latter half of 2022, and presumably is no longer sold. Updates for the "Definitive 2018" products continued being offered into the 2020s, often focusing around inclusion of new versions of open source components such as OpenSSH, and support for additional virtualization environments such as KVM and Proxmox. Updates have also included enhancements to Xinuos' upgrade management tool, patchck. == Lawsuit against IBM and Red Hat ==

In March 2021 Xinuos announced that it had sued IBM and its subsidiary Red Hat. The lawsuit, filed in the District Court of the Virgin Islands, claimed that IBM "stole" its intellectual property and that IBM and Red Hat together "conspired to illegally corner a market and crush competition." The action's intellectual property claims were partly rooted in the 1998, multi-company Project Monterey effort. This led some industry observers to characterize the Xinuos suit as an attempt to relitigate the SCO v. IBM case, which the company had stated multiple times that it would not do. In response to the action, IBM said the "allegations merely rehash the stale claims of its predecessor ... and have no merit." Law360 and Bloomberg Law reported that broader claims of anti-competitive conduct were at issue in the lawsuit. which produce considerable revenues for SUSE S.A. and Canonical Ltd, respectively. In November 2022, the case was transferred from its original Virgin Islands filing site to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on the grounds of convenience to the parties and witnesses involved. In April 2024, U.S. District Judge Cathy Seibel issued a summary judgment against Xinuos on the copyright claim, saying that the associated litigation rights had not transferred from The SCO Group to Xinuos in the 2011 asset purchase between the two. In April 2025, Xinuos agreed to drop the counts of the lawsuit related to antitrust claims, but held onto the right to appeal the prior summary judgment on the copyright claim. Xinuos filed an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on that copyright charge shortly thereafter. ==Products==

The main products of Xinuos are the following: • OpenServer 5 Definitive 2018 is an IA-32 Unix operating system which was originally developed by the Santa Cruz Operation. OpenServer 5 was a descendant of SCO UNIX, which is in turn a descendant of Xenix (SVR3.2). • OpenServer 6 Definitive 2018 is an IA-32 Unix operating system based on the SVR5 kernel in an environment to maintain compatibility with OpenServer 5. • UnixWare 7 Definitive 2018 is an IA-32 Unix operating system descending from AT&T UNIX System V. UnixWare 2.x and below were direct descendants of SVR4.2, and was originally developed by Unix System Laboratories (USL), Univel, Novell, and later the Santa Cruz Operation. UnixWare 7 was sold as a Unix OS combining UnixWare 2 and OpenServer 5 and was based on SVR5. UnixWare 7.1.2 was branded OpenUNIX 8, but later releases returned to the UnixWare 7.1.x name and version numbering ==References==