page_title: SCO Forum
section_title: SCO Group in Vegas years
hierarchical_section_title: SCO Forum / SCO Group in Vegas years
caption_attribution_description: English: Entrance signs as seen on the Sunday evening of SCO Tec Forum 2008 in the conference rooms area of the Luxor in Las Vegas, Nevada.
context_page_description: SCO Forum was a technical computer conference sponsored by the Santa Cruz Operation, briefly by Caldera International, and later The SCO Group that took place during the 1980s through 2000s. It was held annually, most often in August of each year, and typically lasted for much of a week. From 1987 through 2001 it was held in Santa Cruz, California, on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The scenic location, amongst redwood trees and overlooking Monterey Bay, was considered one of the major features of the conference. From 2002 through 2008 it was held in Las Vegas, Nevada, at one of several hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. Despite the name and location changes, the conference was considered to be the same entity, with both the company and attendees including all instances in their counts of how many ones they had been to.
  During the keynote addresses for the Santa Cruz conferences, SCO would present its vision of the direction of the computer industry and how its products fit into that direction.
context_section_description: Caldera International continued to encounter significant financial struggles, made worse by the effects of the early 2000s recession.
  As a cost-saving measure, in May 2002 the company indicated that the world-wide Forum conference in Santa Cruz would be dropped; instead, there would be smaller events around the world, including one at a different location in the United States.
  In June 2002, Caldera International changed management, with Darl McBride taking over as CEO from Ransom Love.
  In July 2002 the annual Forum conference was renamed for that year to Caldera GeoFORUM, and its location was moved to an environment that could not have been more different from the redwoods of Santa Cruz – the Las Vegas Strip, at the MGM Grand.
  Then during the opening keynote address of the conference, on August 26, 2002, it was announced that Caldera was changing its name back to SCO, in the form of the new name The SCO Group.  This reflected recognition of the reality that almost all of the company's revenue was coming from SCO Unix, not the Linux products that had come from Caldera, and that resellers were not making the switch to Linux.  
  McBride made the announcement in flashy style; as Linux Journal described, "Using a high-tech multimedia show, the Caldera image was shattered into shards by the new SCO Group logo, which is pretty much the same as the old SCO logo."
  The announcement was met with a standing ovation from the Forum audience, almost all of whom were longtime SCO resellers.  (Some former employees of the Santa Cruz Operation, however, grew to resent the rebirth of the SCO name and said that "it was no longer our SCO."  Some industry observers expressed the same lament.)  Some new initiatives were announced, such as the SCObiz collaboration with Vista.com, where that company's CEO John Wall gave a keynote showing how SCObiz would give a Web-based e-commerce capability to older SCO-based applications in the small-to-medium-business segment.
  By the time of the Las Vegas Forum 2003 rolled around, McBride had led the SCO Group in a very different direction, issuing proclamations and lawsuits based upon a belief that SCO Unix intellectual property had been incorporated into Linux in an unlawful and uncompensated manor, and halting sales of the company's own Linux product.  The SCO–Linux disputes were fully underway and the SCO Group was mired in controversy.  
  eWeek magazine reported that in response to pressure from the open source community and Linux vendors, Intel withdrew its sponsorship of Forum 2003 and HP decided not to give a partner keynote address.  Nonetheless, HP did sponsor the welcome reception at the hotel, which eWeek said was well attended.
  During the opening keynote, held on August 17, 2003, and accompanied by James Bond music (Vegas Forums tended to use Hollywood or Vegas motifs in their opening sessions), McBride, vice president Chris Sontag, and a representative from law firm Boies Schiller showed what they said were clear examples of SCOs protected Unix code being found in Linux.  Despite the prominence of the legal situation, there was also emphasis at this Forum on SCO products and their roadmaps for further development and features.
  SCO continued to be the subject of intensely hostile feelings from the open source and Linux community, with the Groklaw website leading the way.  SCO would soon become, as Businessweek headlined, "The Most Hated Company In Tech".
  SCO Forum 2004, themed "The Power of UNIX", explicitly emphasized the history of SCO Unix and ongoing product development work over the Linux matters.  
  It attracted some 550 attendees.
  McBride said, "It's a quiet show and boring [perhaps for the media] in a good way. It shows we're committed to Unix and we're not just a litigation shop."  A new program, SCO Marketplace, was unveiled, that would let developers bid on new development efforts of software that could be used on SCO Unix.  When still faced with attention regarding legal issues, McBride said, "when people say we're only about litigation, it really bugs me. We have strong engineering tal
caption: The final one: Hotel corridor sign for SCO Tec Forum 2008
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "", "Image Make": "EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY", "Image Model": "KODAK DX7440 ZOOM DIGITAL CAMERA", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "230", "Image YResolution": "230", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image Rating": "0", "Image Tag 0x4749": "0", "Image ExifOffset": "1290", "Image XPTitle": "[0, 0]", "Image XPKeywords": "[70, 0, 111, 0, 108, 0, 100, 0, 101, 0, 114, 0, 115, 0, 59, 0, 70, 0, 111, 0, ... ]", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4762", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3745", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/8", "EXIF FNumber": "17/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "140", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:10:19 19:39:29", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:10:19 19:39:29", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "3", "EXIF ApertureValue": "7/2", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "11/2", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2304", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1536", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "4564", "EXIF ExposureIndex": "140", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "33", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "Low gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0", "EXIF Padding": "[]", "EXIF OffsetSchema": "1832"}