It was originally released by Univel, a jointly owned venture of AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) and Novell.

[1][2] After the SVR4 effort to merge SunOS and System V, AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) formed the Univel partnership with Novell to develop a desktop version of Unix for i386 and i486 machines, codenamed "Destiny".

The MoOLIT toolkit is used for the windowing system, allowing the user to choose between an OPEN LOOK or MOTIF-like look and feel at runtime.

Networking support in UnixWare includes both TCP/IP and interoperability with Novell's NetWare protocols (IPX/SPX); the former were the standard among Unix users at the time of development, while PC networking was much more commonly based on NetWare.

[4] Destiny was released in 1992 as UnixWare 1.0, with the intention of unifying the fragmented PC Unix market behind this single variant of the operating system.

The system was earlier to reach the corporate computing market than Microsoft's Windows NT, but observers of the period remarked that UnixWare was "just another flavor of Unix", Novell's involvement being more a marketing ploy than a significant influx of technology.

[6] In 1994 Novell released UnixWare 1.1, which includes TCP/IP in both the personal and advanced server editions.

[8] UnixWare 2.0, based on the Unix System V release 4.2MP kernel, which added support for multiprocessing, began shipping to OEMs and developers in December 1994,[9] and to the consumer market in March 1995.

[20] On 2 August 2000,[citation needed] Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) announced that it would sell its Server Software and Services Divisions, as well as rights to the OpenServer and UnixWare products, to Caldera Systems.

[citation needed] The remaining part of the Santa Cruz Operation company, the Tarantella Division, changed its name to Tarantella, Inc. Caldera International's initial release of UnixWare was renamed OpenUNIX 8.

The SCO Group continued to maintain UnixWare and issues periodic maintenance updates and support.

[24] On 11 April 2011, UnXis bought The SCO Group operating assets and intellectual property rights after having been approved by the bankruptcy court in Delaware.

In June 2013 UnXis was renamed as Xinuos[29] and announced product and availability for SCO UnixWare 7.1.4+,[30] now supporting both physical and virtual machines.

Later releases are bundled with numerous additional open source applications including Apache, Samba, MySQL, PostgreSQL, OpenSSH, and Mozilla software, as well as amenities such as Sudo, Vim, Tar, Gzip, and Red Hat's RPM Package Manager[34] All versions of SCO operating system distributions including UnixWare also have an extensive set of open source packages available for free download via the SCO Skunkware site.