SCO unleashes Tarantella for Linux

SCO is to release a Linux version of its Tarantella software in Q2, and has struck distribution agreements with Caldera, SuSE and Turbolinux. Tarantella is SCO's answer to Citrix ICA, and is intended to allow diverse clients to run applications remotely on NT and Unix servers. This particular end of the business is starting to look pretty packed, and pretty confusing, but SCO's USP is that - via what is in effect a reverse engineering of Microsoft's Terminal Server RDP protocol - it can do the NT end of the business more cheaply than a Citrix-based solution. Citrix itself is due to go gold with MetaFrame for Solaris shortly, so on the one hand we've got the remote NT guys (Citrix) pushing into Unix territory, while on the other we've got SCO aiming at NT. Citrix itself is adding to the arms race by pushing more and more into ultra-slim clients that won't support heavy graphics, Java and the like and therefore need these to run on the server (via Citrix's "Charlotte" project), and to confuse the issue more than a little, we hear Citrix boss Ed Iacobucci has joined the board of Caldera, which has just partnered with SCO. More info on this when he get it/catch Ed. At the announcement of Tarantella for Linux in New York today SCO seems to have been pelted with the usual 'are you going to open source it' questions, and the answer was of course no, but we don't propose to make anything of that here. But we're slightly baffled by Caldera CEO Ransome Love, who claimed he could make Linux easy to install for your grandmother. We didn't realise Linux-ready grandmothers existed - can you get them in Best Buy? ® See also: SCO crosses Microsoft's Maginot line