The board of directors of the UnixWare Technology Group (UTG) recently voted to disband UTG after the Santa Cruz Operation withdrew its support. Since acquiring UnixWare from Novell, SCO had been the organization's chief source of funding. UTG will be replaced by an internal SCO group, the Enterprise Computing Forum (ECF), which will continue UTG's mission of developing and promoting UnixWare technology in conjunction with SCO's OEMs and ISVs.
UTG was the successor to the Unix International operation, a consortium that promoted Unix System V Release 4 (SVR4), AT&T's version of Unix that was later sold to Novell and became the basis of UnixWare.
UTG is on the record as agreeing with SCO's actions. Michael Dortch, vice president and chief evangelist for UTG, says, "When Novell owned UnixWare, having a separate organization to support OEMs and UnixWare made perfect sense. Now that SCO owns UnixWare, it makes sense to move the organization inside SCO." He asserts that the reorganization should shorten the communications links and provide better access to the people building UnixWare technologies at SCO. "We think this is a strong move, and obviously our board of directors agrees," says Dortch. "It could be one of the best things that has happened to UTG."
SCO is equally positive about the reorganization. Biff Traber, director of OEM relations says, "This change will help us better serve our OEM and ISV customers. They thought they didn't need to have a separate organization, and we were pleased to support them by forming an internal organization."
Traber added that the ECF agenda will include work with projects like Gemini, SCO's new operating system, which will be based on UnixWare and SCO OpenServer. ECF will also be involved with 64-bit and clustering technologies, as well as with improvements in SCO source code technology offerings. ECF membership will be made up of SCO employees providing support to essentially the same OEMs and ISVs who were members of UTG.
The disbanding of UTG continues a recent trend in which open systems organizations have been merged with other groups or disbanded. The Open Group recently assumed custodianship of the X Window System technology, previously owned and managed by the X Consortium. The X Consortium will cease engineering operations by the end of the year. The Open Group itself was formed last February through the union of the Open Software Foundation and X/Open Co.