You won't believe this. A Groklaw member, Jeff Best, has turned up a 1999 CNET article by Stephen Shankland, quoting a Santa Cruz executive saying that Linux not only wasn't hurting SCO -- it was helping:
Santa Cruz Operation added the ability to run Linux programs to its UnixWare operating system, declaring that the upstart operating system has helped UnixWare more than it has harmed it.While Microsoft executives say Linux competes chiefly with Unix systems such as SCO's instead of Windows NT, SCO believes the opposite.
"So far as we've seen it's actually helped us," said Greg Schwarzer, director of small and medium business marketing at SCO. "Linux has got the word out that Unix on Intel is a viable alternative to Microsoft."...
Linux, meanwhile, has reinvigorated the Unix market, he said. "It has given a fresh, revitalized look to what people could do in the Intel space. Linux is a Unix movement. Revenues are going up strongly," Schwarzer said.
Adding support for Linux was a pragmatic choice. "We wanted our users to be able to take advantage of a lot of those applications being written for Linux," he said.
SCO has made the Linux compatibility software source code--the original programming instructions--publicly available, he said, giving the code back to the open source programming community that has developed Linux.
Hilarious. Simply hilarious. He also found this 1998 article on the announcement of Project Monterey. What stands out is that even in 1998, according to the article, Linux was listed as a competitor in the enterprise market, which refutes SCO Group's recent claim that prior to IBM's contributions to Linux in 2000, no one used Linux instead of Unix. Back in 1998, the article ends by noting, Microsoft owned "between 11 and 14 percent of SCO". You can't escape those old press releases.