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Unix Operating Systems Software

SCO Reorganizes, Issues Profit Warning 194

Posted by Hemos from the getting-beat-down dept.
Recently, Jay Maynard wrote: "According to this story in Computerworld, SCO is reorganizing to increase investment in its Tarantella software and Linux, and reduce investment in its core Unix business. They expect to report "significant losses" after reorganization costs. They blame Y2K delays for the slowdown. The story also appears in C/NET."
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SCO Reorganizes, Issues Profit Warning More

SCO Reorganizes, Issues Profit Warning

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  • Same story, different company.

    Netscape. Same.
    SGI. Same.
    Red Hat. Stock falling
    VA Linux. Stock falling and how!

    The plain truth is that there is not one company that is truely successful at making money with Open Source.

    Of course, all the freeloaders and Commies on /. like Open Source. They dont have a job, or a life, so its the only way they can get anything.

  • SCO is a liar (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    People are dancing at the thought of SCO's demise because they remember how very recently SCO was trash talking linux. Specifically, SCO was publishing outright lies about linux. To quote SCO,

    "Linux at this moment can be considered more a play thing for IT students rather than a serious operating system in which to place the functioning, security and future of a business. Because Linux is basically a free-for-all it means that no individual person/company is accountable should anything go wrong, plus there is no way to predict which way Linux will evolve. Yes, it's free, but with the cost of an operating system being only a fraction (3-5%) of the total cost of an IT project is it really a risk worth taking? "

    Check out http://slashdot.org/articles/99 /09/04/1329240.shtml [slashdot.org] for more info. SCO has behaved in a childish and unethical manner, and I for one am glad to see any company that rushes to push FUD at every new threat die a painful death.

  • Remember (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    this [slashdot.org]----------- Isn't it fun to look at old FUD?
  • You may well have learned how to use CDE and configure it well, but I bet it took a long time and was an uphill struggle. I've always given up long before. You take a look at KDE or GNOME and see how easy they are to configure. And how much more flexible they are. Yes, CDE is flexible, but flexible in a way that shows it was designed by a comittee. The number of times I've come up against a Solaris box and wanted an XTerm instead of a DTTerm! It always takes me ages to remember how to configure it (clue: You can't use the GUI tools).

    No to mention the fact that it's butt ugly and uses Motif which, while it *is* an industry standard, is still not liked by most people. Witness the threads in the last slashdot story about Motif.
  • SCO will definitely not be the first. Coherent got killed by Linux already many years ago.

  • DG/UX (Score:1)

    by Tet ( 2721 )
    My only regret is that I can't convince my department to drop support for them completely and pick up a more worthy UNIX (Like DG/UX. Man they rock...)

    Moving from SCO to DG/UX isn't trivial. Unless you're already running SCO on a DG AViiON, you'll need to buy new hardware. Athough DG/UX can be persuaded to run on a standard PC, they won't sell it to you unless it's to run on one of their own machines. I agree that the DG/UX kernel is very nice, I just wish they'd ship a more complete userland. BTW, anyone know how to trace system calls on DG/UX (there's no truss, strace, ktrace etc.)?

  • Well, you're almost right.

    The only company I know of that's making money hand over fist, and all the while giving away all their source code, is ArsDigita [arsdigita.com]. They do a lot of work with AOLserver [aolserver.com], but more importantly, their ArsDigita Community System [arsdigita.com] is totally open and free to anyone. Their angle: it takes a smart (and well-paid) group of people to apply these tools to a client's needs (also, there's a lot more to web development than code).

  • So how is Tarantella any better, apart from the SCO brand name?
  • So, as far as safety and ability in a statistical sense, computers always outperform humans in such critical tasks. The higher the time sensitivity and complexity, the larger their advantage.

    Computers would be more reliable in routine performance, but I think a human pilot will be much better at handling unforseen situations and unexpected occurances. I'd rather see computers help a pilot, not eliminate him.

  • How can you act like beowulf is useless. Beowulf is one of the most powerful technologies developed recently. Why do you think people like IBM are making these giant beowulf clusters?

    Let me see if I can translate here. I think I know what he said. Beowulf is great for doing massive parellel projects like partical caculations and nuclear weapons tests. You can break those down into smaller subsets and feed them to different processors to do smaller work. Like what seti is doing now.

    But beowulf sucks, and I agree, when it comes to something like playing Quake.

  • I'd argue that QNX is what killed Coherent. Coherent, if I recall, was promoted mainly for "appliance" applications, not for business servers or desktops.
  • Now THAT is a good post.

    Slashdot needs some way of collecting good posts like this (not necessarily directly replies to the topic but just good little essays worth reading in their own right) and letting people who may not necessarily be interested in the top-level topic read them.

    perhaps some kind of "search all threads for comments moderated to level 5", or some kind of moderation flag (like the "funny" tag) for something like "classic" that can be searched for also...

    Just a thought...

    Rob

  • I know that there some how related, or once were.. Can anyone shead some light onto this history?

  • I don't disagree that SCO makes a decent OS, but when SCO bought UnixWare, I dumped it fast, and here's why:

    • Price jumped from $150 to $700.
    • I started having all kinds of problems compiling my Open Source software because of the funky XOPEN and POSIX ifdefs all over the system header files that were nearly impossible to get right.
    • When the new version of UnixWare came out, and my SCSI Zip and Jaz drives stopped working, the SCO tech's response was "You haven't found a bug because those devices aren't in our supported hardware list.". I realized that if I had complained on a Linux newsgroup, the problem would've been fixed in hours.

    SCO shot themselves in the foot with their stupid pricing and belief that only large customers used their product and/or deserved decent support. I don't care how good or bad their products are, I expected them to go down the tubes.

  • Me: No, actually its worse. This one has a lot more editions - base, business, departmental, enterprise and data center.

    Wow!! It sounds nearly as bad as Windows 2000.

    -Brent
  • What's the point in Tarantella, now we have cool things like Workspot (on Slashdot a few days ago) which are a free solution for delivering Unix apps over the Web?

    So, I *really* want to use Workspot to run my internal datacenter? I didn't think think so...

    -Brent
  • So how is Tarantella any better, apart from the SCO brand name?

    I don't want to have to have a T1 connection to the internet, and store my sensitive data on a server on the internet, just to be able to use it through a web browser.

    -Brent

  • The MS EULA contains very similar language - the amusing part is I first encountered it in the EULA for the Word 2000. Good thing I did, too - I was just about to start developing our nuclear facility maintenance scheduler using WordBasic macros. Guess I'll just have to do the damn thing in Perl, now.

  • Unlike the vast majority of my fellow posters, I don't think this article, or SCO's expected losses are an end for the Santa Cruz Organization. This step is completely logical. Right now, SCO is having to maintain it's own flavor of UNIX, along with it's own pool of programmers, etc, etc, etc. With SCO moving to support Linux, they are lifting from themselves the terrible burden of maintaining their own operating system and putting that burden on a group that appears to be more than willing to tote it: Open Source programmers. By moving to Linux, they won't be able to make quite as much profit as they did selling their own proprietary UNIX, which is one of the reasons they expect their figures to be down. But in the longrun they will be able to cut their expenditures making SCO's final bottem line figure even more profitable than before. This is nothing new, and something we will be seeing more venders of proprietary UNIX versions moving toward. I'll give you these three articles from Slashdot's past that point to this trend: Number 1 [slashdot.org] Number 2 [slashdot.org] Number 3 [slashdot.org] I think we should start seeing some great things out of SCO, maybe even "SCO LinuxOS", whatever. Just don't write their epitath quite yet (save your energy for M$)
  • Ie worked with SCO Unix systems and with the free Unices today, I wonder why anyone would want to purchase SCO.
  • I have to admit that does sound quite gay..

    :)
  • Obveeouslee owt too correct everee meestake ayee make!
  • I worked last year on SCO RMCOBOl, for the y2k problem;

    Using the ibcs2 (or something like that) module under linux, you can exucute SCO programs, and RMCOBOL was working without a problem.
  • Oh, but isnt it intuitive and nice to *add* REMOVE entries to remove things from the panel that are in the systemwide config? Egh, yah, and dtterm and the eternal 'you have to keep the stuff you want to copy marked until you paste it'.

    *sigh* I could list probably a hundred annoyances with CDE. Which is why I went to the extreme bother of getting gnome compiled under HP-UX, which, in the betas wasnt that easy.
  • Yeah, 'cause there's nothing like a little rubbing of salt into fresh wounds to make a mature company feel better about itself :) Seriously, that's a good idea -- why don't you send a proposal to the CFO over at Walnut Creek and see if he agrees with your ever-so financially sound argument for the buyout.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • I wonder why anyone would want to purchase SCO

    Simple, two reasons:


    1) Applications that only run under SCO. Take for example, the two big COBOL (no laughing) run-time environments, MicroFocus and RMCobol. They actively check to make sure that the run-time is SCO.


    2) Propritary drivers. The best (and sadest) example of this is Digiboard EP/CX remote serial concentrators. GREAT hardware (ever watch an RS-232 device get hit by lightning and still work afterwards?), but driven by product managers who will not return calls, email, faxes, and even hang up on you when you ask about FreeBSD or Linux drivers. "We only deal with reputable firms".


    They're soon not going to not deal with anyone. I've surplused $50k worth of their stuff instead of buying another $100k just because of their inaine driver philosophy. There are enough companies with clues that we don't need to deal with clueless ones.


    The whole thing comes down to what one of my friends said after working (and leaving SCO after 18 months) there, their unofficial motto was: "Don't do drugs... in the halls". Their managers have perpetually done drugs and that has made all the difference.

  • Any OS can Beowulf cluster.

    Then I will be most astounded when you set up a beowulf of Windows 95 boxen.

  • Moo (Score:1)

    by AcquaCow ( 56720 )
    Moof!
  • umm...(Dr. Evil) Riiight...(/Dr Evil)
  • Looks like SCO is going to be the first Unix effectively killed by Linux.

    Ironic, isn't it? All this time we've been gloating over how Linux will be at the forefront of a Unix revolution that will crush Bill's Evil Empire, when all Linux has actually done in the market is cannibalise other Unices, starting with the x86-based ones. Windows's market share has not decreased at all since the 2.0 kernel was released; only other non-Windows OSs have been affected.

    I'd wager BSDI/OS is next to go.

    I'll take that wager--with the recent merger of BSDI and FreeBSD, BSDI will survive by providing support and services for their consolidated Open Source OS.

    --

  • SCO sucks, and always has. They were in the right place at the right time, and that carried them for a while. The problem is that now they have to compete against other options, and most UNIX admins will resign rather than work on SCO (unless they are in a small market). We have SCO on our ISPs, and it is treated like an application (if the system runs out of swap, that's treated like a bug, and a new release is made so that that won't happen again). We use SCO primarily due to inertia, and we treat it this way because otherwise we'd have to work on it rather than letting the developers do it.
  • maybe a play on skunkworks, of lockheed martin fame. they do r&d
  • Course, it's not the fastest, or the slickest, or the coolest. You really think the business world cares about all the nifty little features in Linux? They don't - they care about the bottom line. When you need stability, SCO can deliver.


    One could say the same things about Solaris/x86, plus that is gratis nowadays. I think only old customers would stick to SCO now, I don't see any future for it. I ordered one of the "free" licences once, in fact it wasn't exactly free since the media kit was $100. Yes I liked it, and I've worked a year at a UNIX-teaching company that used Unixware.


    But Solaris/x86 is about as stable, is less standard SYSV.R4, but OTOH Solaris is almost a de facto UNIX standard nowadays. Now that it is free, any companies needing a commercially supported UNIX OS are likely to choose Solaris.


    I guess Sun will continue to fund and develop Solaris/x86 even if they don't make profit from it. Reason: it's users, if they want to scale up, will be more likely to migrate to Sun Sparc hardware with more or less the same Operating System. Indirectly, it helps their Sparc hardware sales.

  • Are you talking about SCO UNIX, or about Unixware? It must be SCO (which I don't know too well personally).

    They bought Unixware some years ago, and that has always been (IMO) the best and most standard implementation of SYSVR4 for PC's. In fact, the Unixware group, bought from Novell, and bought by them from AT&T, is/was the original AT&T UNIX group, the place where UNIX was born. It is/was *THE* standard UNIX. (Personally though, I'm more a BSD guy, and I run FreeBSD at home, occasionally Solaris/x86 because I work with Solaris/sparc for my job).

    I've tought UNIX coarses on it for a year. That was on 486's with 32MB of RAM. The students always were truely amazed when I told them that the 10 of them were all using the same single machine (compiling, editing etc, accessed by X-terminals).

    Nowadays, Solaris kind of has taken over the status of the keeper of the UNIX standard, because of their big market share. I don't see much future for UnixWare esp. since Solaris/x86 now is freely available. That is sad, Unixware dying is a tragic milestone in the history of UNIX.
  • So they open source some stuff, what do we have then? Another failing company that open sources as a last ditch effort to save it's skin? Sounds a lot like Mozilla to me. Did Netscape really embrace OSS, does AOL? JWZ didn't seem to think so. I don't think we're going to see a shift like that, corporations full of PHB's don't change their minds unless glossy 12 pages ads say they should.

    Or maybe I'm wrong, and Mozilla will pull it off. Maybe SCO can if get into OSS (or make a fake attempt to) and turn themselves around. Personally, I'd be surprized.

  • OK, the points about the usability problems with Beowulf and commercial software such as databases and web servers are well taken.

    But Beowulf isn't the only clustering technology for Linux. How do the business-targeted clustering products from TurboLinux or SGI (or others) stack up compared to the UnixWare clustering/SMP approach?
  • As a unix user who has had the misfortune
    to work on the CDE implementations on HPUX
    and Solaris for the past few years, and on
    HP VUE before it became CDE, I feel comfortable
    in my knowledge that CDE is a gigantic piece
    of crap. If only some proprietary app developers
    would ensure that their apps would run on
    ICCCM-certified window managers, instead of coding
    for the vagaries of MWM, I would have chucked
    it long ago.

    The configuration subsystem is full of bugs.
    Ditto session-management. How many times have I set
    the session up to do exactly what I want,
    did "make current session the home
    session in the dialog box, only to have it
    completely forget this the next time I booted up!
    The printer queue is a travesty. The popup menus
    are non-inutitive and buggy. Adding a non-CDE
    app to the menu is an exercise in frustration.

    And I have just begun to scratch the surface.

    Hari.
  • Plus, FreeBSD is at least as stable as SCO OpenServer.

    Doesn't that counter the whole rest of your post? I mean, why would anyone pay thousands of dollars for a *NIX that they could get from a free product like BSD when they are equally stable? I have to admit, I've never used SCO, but to get a company to shell out thousands of dollars, they gotta offer something more than "equal in stability to FreeBSD".

    Now Tarantella, on the other hand, is a different story...
  • This type of disclaimer is perfectly normal. There's a difference between a bank loosing $10M because of an OS bug and people dying in an airplane crash or a nuclear powerplant meltdown. If I know that the odds of my product failing is once every 10M years, then I'm willing to garranty it for a bank... not for an airplane. I don't believe I'd trust any UNIX (forget NT!) in charge of the low-level (navigation, autopilot) stuff in an airplane.
  • Never said a computer couldn't control an airplane. I just said I wouldn't trust any UNIX (or NT) system to do it. The reason for that is that these operating systems are way too complex to be totally bug free (which is what you need). Currently most (all) "real critical" applications are very low complexity, so they can be bug free.
  • As a programmer where do you really see the advantage of having multitudes of proprietary solutions instead of public open ones. That's what UNIX was about originally, the standards. The big bad mistake was for the license to allow for proprietary modifications, because certain companies uses every trick they can think of to lock their users into their traps.

    If UNIX is ever going to develop beyond the standard UNIX base, it will have to support a more open development. It may feel good to be nostalgic about something, but it doesn't help development much in the longer run.

    Not that I believe "programming for free" can solve all problems mind you. The way I see it companies are going to have to support open source more and more. It will be more efficient to collaborate, and it will give them invaluable PR as people get more clue about freedom in their own lives.

    - Steeltoe

    What do you do to limit yourself today?
  • Every Major Commercial Unix system has the top disclaimer against using it in aircraft, air traffic, etc. But yet when I worked at Lockheed Martin in the Air Traffic Control division we used them all. All LM did was pay large gobs of money to HP, DEC, IBM, and Sun and they blessed it. It's just there as others have pointed out to keep them from getting sued.
  • Actually, there have been some quarrels between SCO and Microsoft recently. Microsoft wanted them to still maintain compatibility with old Xenix in their OpenServer product, because that's what was in the deal when MS sold Xenix to SCO, but SCO complainted this is useless (who wants Xenix compatibility nowadays)..

  • SCO-Unix is a falling star in my opinion. When I am considering to install a server, my options are Linux && FreeBSD. (Maybe Solaris if it is a Sparc something...)

    But there is also rising stars in the UNIX sphere
    These stars are called Linux and FreeBSD (And NET and OPEN).

    Then it is easy to see why SCO is counting on The rising stars in stead of their own falling one... Espesially when when there is more money in Tarantella then in their falling star...

  • Have a look at this [www.tpc.org], by the end of the list (Unisys hardware). We were and still are, the best performing OS for this benchmark on non-NUMA Intel based systems using Oracle as the RDBMS. I myself had to sweat a while in CA to get that score. Now, what the marketing people and the always unpredictable stock market made of it, is beyond my understanding.

    These days, being good just is not enough, you also have to boast about your achievements in such a way that the speculators on Wall Street become aware that you're doing serious stuff.

    This could have been posted anonymously but it isn't.
  • who is insulted by this?

    I mean, as soon as things get too tough for them, they run screaming to Linux to try to shore up their bottom-line.

    Free-software isnt a bandwagon, or a fad, or a political stance. You cant just turn around and decide that you're losing in the big game, so lets just jump on the Linux 'bandwagon'.

    Piss off SCO, you lose.

  • Wow, Linux doesn't support SMP? The mind boggles.

    Methinks that you should check your facts before posting, especially ones as trivial as stating "this OS doesn't support SMP", when it very clearly does.

  • Re:Moo (Score:1)

    by ZRex ( 103178 )
    sometimes, late at night, when no one's around and the house is really quiet, i like to dress up in my sister's clothing and do the lambada with a blowup doll of david arquette while listening to showtunes
  • somebody help! my dingdong's stuck in my blender!
  • WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT SCO???? THEY"D HAVE TO PAY ME A MILLION DOLLARS TO WORK ON THAT SHIT!!!!
  • uh, can anyone name a commercial software product that is certified for such use?

    not apple, not mshaft, not qnx, not linux, not sun, not irix, not...any of them. all of their products have this disclaimer.

    one particularly famous one was shipped with IE 4.01 (i think) the disclaimer read similarly, but was about "Sun Microsystems Java". okay, let me make this clear: no company has a commercial software product certified for use in the above scenarios.

    typically, such software is part of an "integrated whole" and certified at the systemic level.

    i used to write s/w for a medical device that could possibly kill, if something went wrong. it ran dos 5.0, so there you go. microsoft never certified it for that use. it cleared the FDA at the system level by showing the variety of ways it detected errors and notified the operator of same.
  • they were so strong up to the early 1990's. then...argggh.

    company i was working for replaced a couple compaq/sco boxes with a bunch of nt machines (ten or so). performance was degraded for quite awhile.

    last i heard (i no longer work there) things are much better. but the owner was miffed that although he eliminated the $40K/yr sco licensing, he ended up paying something a little over $100k to mshaft when the conversion was over (ten fully loaded, legal nt boxes ain't cheap).

    i saw something about benchmarks in another post, i wonder how well oracle is doing with improving linux?

    without improved db support/performance under linux, mshaft is going to bulldoze sco. of course, even coming close makes linux/sco/oracle a good option, if they can keep the price reasonable.
  • *sigh* Unfortunately it seems that scalability cannot be brought into a discussions these days without a mention of Beowulf. And even more unfortunately the people who are first to propose beowulf as the end-all be-all solution for all your scalability needs are the people who don't understand basic concepts behind clustering.

    This is not to disparage Beowulf in any ways. It is a wonderful piece of software for building large scale distributed processing systems that run custom (typically scientific) applications to one of the various parallel processing libraries such as PVM or MPI.

    However, we have to look at the larger picture and consider the needs of more common computing tasks, such as high availability and scalability for business-class applications.

    A "commercial" cluster of this type must provide application failover that is trasparent for clients. Beowulf does not do this because it is not what it is designed for.

    For that form of scalability, you would be better off looking at a something like Veritas ClusterManager, Linux Virtual Server or TurboCluster. And even then you would have to look at what your application is and decide what approach to high availability is right for you.

    As an example, look at the approach that TurboCluster uses. Incoming network connections do not go directly to the machines that service them; instead all incoming connections go to a dispatch server which then sends them to the back-end serves based on availability as well as current load.

    Then compare that the the was Unixware Non-Stop Clustering works. With NSC each node in the cluster has its own IP address. In addition to that, there is a "Cluster Virtual IP" (CVIP) address that is used as the alias for the network card in one of the nodes. In the event of a failure of that node, one of the other machines in the cluster will alias its own interface to the CVIP and perform a gratuitous ARP broadcast, thereby overwriting the cache of any machines on the local network that may still contain the MAC address of the pervious owner of the CVIP.

    The dispatch method has the advantage that it provides a simple method for providing both high-availability and load-balancing with very little added administration. However you do run into the problem that the dispatch server is then a single point of failure as well as a potential traffic bottleneck.

    The CVIP method is more heavy-handed; however it does eliminate the single point of failure and does away with the need for a dedicated machine as a dispatcher.

    Scalability is a more difficult issue. With Beowulf it isn't as much of an issue, as applications are written specifically to parallelize the task. However business applications are typically written to run as a single threaded process or as a group of processes communicating via IPC mechanisms. Not suprisingly, this will not scale on Beowulf.

    The problem being that to distribute threads or IPC across a cluster, you need to maintain something refered to commonly as Single System Image (SSI). This can be thought of as the logical extension of SMP into the conecpt of clustering. Not only does each processor in a machine have equal access to all resources within that machine, each node has equal access to all resources within the cluster.

    In other words, if an applications launches multiple processes, and one of those processes gets migrated to another machine, it has to be ABSOLUTELY transparent to the application. So you need things such as a single process list, a unified namespace for devices, some method for sharing devices (either via multiple paths or through shipped I/O), transparent IPC across the cluster, etc.

    This is a very tricky proposition. And the sad part thing is that most applications still need modification to scale properly on SSI cluster, due to the bottlenecks in the interconnect technology. This is especially true when ethernet is being used as an interconnect as it suffers both from bandwidth issues and latency issues.

    *looks*

    It seems like I've gotten a bit to rambling. My point is that there is no single way to scale that suits all possible needs. Beowulf is one technology, service dispatch is another, SSI clustering is another, etc, etc.

  • You ask why someone would do SMP with the power and flexibility of Beowulf? And I can only answer you should do more research before you sing the praises of any technology.

    Any cluster technology is only as good as its interconnect, to start with. Even were you to use gigabit ethernet, it would pale in comparison to even the fairly narrow bus that Intel processors run on. Looking at higher end crossbar architectures for SMP and you are looking at a huge difference in raw bandwidth, as well as latency.

    Keeping this in mind, you have to start thinking about the cost of performing IPC between nodes or processes on disparate nodes accessing the same memory range. This becomes especially messy when you have to deal with cache coherency.

    For example, lets say processor 1 on node 1 (P1N1) decides to read memory addess A on node 2 (N2). Fine, the contents of the address is shipped to P1N1 which stores it in its cache. Next processor 1 on node 3 (P1N3) decides to read that memory addess. N2 notices that the page is still mapped to P1N1, so it has to send a request to N1 to flush the cache lines of the processors so it can update the actual memory address so it can send the value to P1N3.

    I would go further in depth but I don't think I am sufficiently eloquent enough at this time of the morning to explain it properly.

    If the subject interests you, I would suggest picking up a copy of "In Search of Clusters: The Ongoing Battle in Lowly Parallel Computer" by Gregory Pfister. The book goes into great depths in describing the scalability issues with clusters as compared to SMP in chapter 6. :)

    There is also another post by me in this thread talking more about the applications where Beowulf simply does not make sense.
  • Even my female collie could write a better system than SCO UNIX. But the fact is, the 45-yr old managers out there are usually quite reserved and usually have heard of SCO, while also having heard about Linux and FreeBSD, they'd rather go with an established product like SCO, even if it doesn't make technical sense.

  • Just to put history straight (from an ex-SCO employee of less than one week) OpenServer was originally from AT&T SysV R3.2 Unix source, not Xenix source. Yes alot of Xenix'isms were ported across but we were at one point developing Xenix and OSR5 (formerly ODT) from completely separate source bases.
  • Thanks for the information James. I think perhaps that's cleared it all up for us.

    In closing, I'd like to add: YHBT. HAND.

    -lb

  • How can you act like beowulf is useless. Beowulf is one of the most powerful technologies developed recently. Why do you think people like IBM are making these giant beowulf clusters?

    If they were so ineffective, how would it be rated at just below the 50th fastest super computer in the world?

    I don't understand how you can say beowulf is an inferior technology. Just because the things you're skilled are fast becoming obsolete doesn't mean you should reject new, better technologies.

    Beowulf is the next big thing, and it blows away anything you can do with smp. Either jump on the bandwagon or get left in the dust.

    -lb

  • OK... I didn't post this. My name is Charlie, I *RUN* RawTruth.com, using the pseudonym MadPoet. I am CERTAINLY not a "hit-counter whore" and I also haven't posted any of these spam articles. I don't know *WHO* would try to tarnish my sites reputation. I have been running RawTruth for almost a year now, and I have NEVER, repeat NEVER, used spam to advertise. Always legit stuff. Affiliate programs, link exhanges. You get the idea. And we've grown too. We're certainly no /., but we have a user base that is well-established, and we have a niche reader group. Once again, I apologize, and I will be looking into this misuse and misrepresentation of my website. Thank you.

    Charlie Marshall, Webmaster, RawTruth.com
    CEO, Alkali Media.
    ----
    Alkali Media, The Digital Media Company
  • We've been taking our "risks" for years on Linux -- just rolling the dice, Russian roulette, really. [sarcasm]

    Lord, if they only would have learned that the open-source model of Linux has indeed had quite a predictable evolution: increasing stability (in both operation as an OS and in market position).

    Isn't it funny (+sad) listening/reading the stuff that OS companies say about Linux (and other open-source operating systems)? Shouldn't they really should just shut their holes, study the open-source, and learn something? ;-)
  • How about: SCO's top management is arrogant, has their head stuck up their rear, their service sucks, their product is full of bugs and is a nightmare to support....

    When Linux became mature enough to compete with SCO OpenServer, I dumped SCO OpenServer in a hearbeat. I was tired of bugs that SCO refused to fix, the yearly price increases, the yearly re-shuffling of the product line so that any quote I did for my customers had to be totally re-written (as vs. just update the pricing) for SCO's latest "well, we didn't like the way we'd split up Unix last time, we have a DIFFERENT split this year!" trick... and the unreliability. God, the unreliability! We still have OpenServer at the office. The NFS is flakey. The SCSI tape driver locks up every other night (or did until we moved the nightly backup to the Linux box). The print spooler has locked up semi-randomly for the past ten years, and SCO has never managed to make it work right. Getting any free software to compile on OpenServer is a pain in the rear because it is totally non-standard. Etc. etc. etc.

    In the past SCO has skated over all of this because, as buggy as they are, they were still less buggy than Microsoft products. But most of us who were forced to use SCO Unix in an earlier life find Linux (or FreeBSD) to be such a relief that singing "ding dong, the witch is dead!" is a natural reaction to seeing SCO in trouble.

    -E

  • I dunno what else they could do to maintain any form of economy.

    Get a product people care about maybe? Nobody cares about thin clients because, even though buyers want them, nobody wants to sell the hardware. In order to make a compelling case for thin client hardware, it has to be significantly cheaper than the alternative. Cheap computers have terrible margins, so hardware vendors don't want to bother. And thus SCO finds itself up shit creek, and the Penguin swimming upstream came along and grabbed the Unixware paddles.

    This attitude of "open source it!" is senseless. Has it occurred to anyone that maybe the reason open source software works so well isn't that it's open source but rather that a real person, not a committee or focus group, saw a need - usually his own - and started hacking up a solution? A product that doesn't meet any need will be no more successful just because the license has changed. That doesn't mean that some sort of procedure by which a failed company's IP becomes automatically open to the world would be bad. But counting on open source to save your ass from a bad product decision isn't the right approach, and it doesn't work.

  • The Microfocus Unix Product Matrix here: http://www.merant.com/ads/support/matr ix.asp [merant.com] lists Red Hat Linux and SCO as being supported for the same set of products.

    The set of applications available for SCO and not native on Linux is growing smaller by the hour.

  • I had to use SCO for mission critical apps. It did work quite well. The only problem I had was when I needed help or information on their implementation. The org wasn't there. They seemed quite a mess.

    I remember seeing at the 98 USENIX convention lots of SCO boxes being offered for free with few takers. You didn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.... :)
  • ... at the Linux Expo in Paris. LOL. Last time I tried to install that crap (3 years ago?) the install crashed with an informative error message: "Error #6956. Please contact SCO Technical Services."
  • linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu -- It's free. They reply quicker than any tech support I've ever dealt with. Plus you don't have to hear the cheesy muzzak for hours. I've asked 2 very technical points lately, instant reply. (Please, don't bother them with user-land issues)
  • Dude, you are a bit out of touch with reality. BSD/OS and FreeBSD are merging. Now, I would like to see the new BSD corporation buy SCO just show who really did win the BSD/SYSV war :)
  • Any OS can Beowulf cluster. The thing is, genuine SVR4 code can scale like nothing else (well, except Unicos, but that is kind of a specialized product). Solaris, SCO, and others will beat Linux in the scaling arena for quite some time still. Only when Linux can scale reasonably well past four processors (with fine grained control, truth be known, Beowulf is crap and usefull for only a small subset of parallel problems) and hit 64 or 128 with nearly linear speed improvement will commercial SVR4 loose the edge it has in scalability.
  • I think this is sarcasm, so I will bite. I never said it was financially sound. I just said it would kick ass. Though, the longer I think about it, the better off both corporations would be.
  • WRT to "sooo much hotter," a buyout of an established Unix vendor by a free software vendor has never been done. So BSD would be instantly propelled into the limelight and may be able to chip heavily into Linux's presence just from the mere fact it bought out SCO. Additionally, SCO has a lot of really nice proprietary stuff some of the most highly scalable kernel code ever (read the discussion involving why Beowulf clusters suck for real work above). Plus, if they wanted to, they can keep control of the Tranetella technology allowing them to expand into other markets. And damn, SCO has a huge existing user base.
  • I am not treating it like it is nothing. I am treating it realistically. There are things which Beowulf clusters are simply useless for. They are all things which require fine-grained multiprocessing. Beowulf (by design) only supports coarse-grained mutliprocessing. This is why you cannot build a database server around Beowulf. This is also why you can build a 3D render farm around it. SMP will have a place for quite some time. As for the 50th place, that revolves around the fact the Top 500 test uses a lot of linpack routines that simply are coarse-grained. This is done so that fine-grained processors are not at a unique advantage. They may sure as hell be fast, but they are useless for somethings. Kind of like running a GUI on a teletype.

    I think you should look at the problem realistically instead of eating the shit you would typically be fed around here. Beowulf clusters built on Linux are not the end-all/be-all of computing. There are real needs and uses for hardware and software of all types and Linux simply doesn't cut it for most if them. Nothing does. This is why we have multiple tools.
  • Microsoft sold Xenix (which Gates wanted nothing to do with) to SCO (which then, in 1979, sold a V6 derivative) in return for a 12% stake in SCO. Xenix later became OpenServer.
  • You obviously didn't read my post. For most problems, Beowulf simply imposes too much overhead to be cost effective. In fact, power and flexibilty come only with SMP. Beowulf works well for large problems with highly independent calculations. But for most problems and mathematical modelling, using Beowulf only imposes overhead and offers no performance gain and usually a performance loss. You should really learn about such an advanced topic before posting comments which do not make sense.

    Also, Beowulf would do notthing for website hosting. SMP could help on the back end if a lot of CGI or database access were involved. But most (nearly all?) websites have bandwidth as the bottleneck. This is why it is perfectly acceptable to use Linux on a webserver. But for a serious database server which will be handling many, many simultaneous queries, Linux is out, use SVR4.
  • What's the point in Tarantella, now we have cool things like Workspot (on Slashdot a few days ago) which are a free solution for delivering Unix apps over the Web?
  • Call up your local IBM, Lotus or Sybase rep and ask them which x86 Unix-family OS they recommend for their products. Even a year ago, the answer would have been SCO. Not anymore. I'm told Sybase now even goes so far these days as to encourage their existing SCO customers to make the switch to Linux.

    Oracle seems to be ramping up to do the same, given the pace at which they're porting much of their product line. The bigger-iron Unixes aren't being hurt much by Linux right now, and won't be until good support for SANs and 8-64 CPU servers finds its way in. Which it will. But in the 1-2 CPU server market, Linux is rapidly becoming software vendors' reference platform. It's hard to imagine SCO getting any new OS customers these days, save for the few shops picking Tarantella as their thin-client environment.

    Looks like SCO is going to be the first Unix effectively killed by Linux. Sun will prop up x86 Solaris as long as it costs them practically nothing to recompile it. I'd wager BSDI/OS is next to go. BSDI's big selling points over *BSD were robustness and commercial support. The robustness gap has largely been closed, with things like Solaris and AIX RISC boxen more affordable from above, and Linux and *BSD eating its lunch from below. And anyone with a staff of smart techs and some seed money can set up shop providing support for the free OSes.
  • well, Linux will still have plenty of competition in the Unix world... the 3 BSD's and the really high-end (64+ processors) OSs like Solaris. as for CDE and Motif, I don't hate them, but since their development appears to be as good as dead, I'm glad they're being replaced by open source alternatives. if they weren't dead already, the open source world would probably put more effort in cloning them than in replcing them.
  • Because SCO SUCKS.

    SCO SUUUUCKS ASS.

    Have you ever called SCO tech support? Apparently not.

    'SCO Tech support, may I have your credit card or account number so that I can begin charging you the $50 hourly support fee please?'

    And their systems are incredibly over priced. The reason its dying is because linux/bsd can do everything it can, but better. Makes it rather hard to sell thousands of dollars worth of system software when you can download it free off the net, with source.

    I love Unix as well, but SCO was asking for this for a loooong time.
  • How about training, documentation, support and device driver support from third party hardware manufacturers. It isn't cheap for an individual but a business may consider the cost to be trivial.
  • It was the fragmentation of Unix that allowed Micro$oft to take over in the first place. The more proprietary Unices that die, the happier I am because we can only win the market if we are united and compatable. Open source allows many people and companies to provide solutions for a _single_ base.

    The value of many tools comes from the number of people using it. A fax machine is useless when no one else has a fax. To a lesser extent, the same can be said of Unix - more users = more software = more hardware support = shiny, happy, crash free computers for everyone.
  • Incidentally, something I've wondered about for a long time now . . . why is it called Skunkware?

    (Don't get me wrong; I absolutely LOVE the name ^_~ I'm just not sure I see how they happened to connect "skunk" and "open source software" to make it)
  • I ran several SCO boxes for some time in the early to mid 90s. Back then, they had pretty good SMP. They also had a very good implementation of shared memory that sped up Oracle something fierce (Oracle used about a gazillion back end processes that communicated with shared memory -- fast on VMS, slow on Unices). Put those two things together,and you could get some eye popping performance out of SCO on something like a dual 486/33. Remember Sybase was kicking Oracle ass back then because Oracle ran slowly on Unix.

    I was often frustrated because they where somewhat behind the times in terms of implementing the latest Sys V releases, so porting stuff to it was a bitch, but in a production environment it was great -- really, really stable and fast. I had machine that literally ran for years with no down time. This is what computer users should expect in an OS -- day in day out great performance.

    I've lost touch with SCO over the years, but back then their real strength was squeezing the utmost performance and reliability out of commodity hardware that can be had.

    From a developer standpoint, Linux is the place to be today. It's pure fun fun fun. You never have to wait for the goodies -- somebody has already done most of the work of porting whatever you want,if it wasn't actually developed on Linux. The freedom that a free license gives you is exhilarating -- it allows you to concentrate on your job instead of squinting at obscure licenses agreements and bean counting your usage (where you can convince management that this is worth doing when all you're going to do is find out that you need to spend more money). Linux is also quite good in a production environment, especially in a world where Windows is the benchmark -- that's a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel. However, if I had a serious production environment today, where I wasn't always installing the latest bleeding edge stuff, I'd consider SCO if scaling Linux was a concern. Yes, I know there are ways to do it, but given a choice I'd rather have the job simpler.
  • I got Openserver and UnixWare for free after I bitched them out because they didn't inform me prior to purchase that their product was single user. Isn't that ridiculous, single user unix? Kinda defeats the purpose of unix. Anyways, bitch to them and you will get your cash back.

    I didn't pay anything for it, I bitched at them about their "FREE" Unixware 7 costing $69 on their website and I eventually got a free box set...

    -- iCEBaLM
  • Yeah, it was sarcasm and I was laying it on kinda thick. So now that you've thought about it "longer", why the heck would both companies be better off? I mean, we can assume that SCO would be better off because they certainly couldn't be worse off. But what do the FreeBSD and BSD/OS people have to gain from SCO? They're certainly not going to merge with Unixware... they might pick up some of SCO's keener proprietary stuff, but I don't know how receptive SCO's existing customer base is going to be towards converting everything to BSD. They're more likely to jump onto the Linux train, 'cause it's sooo much hotter right now.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • I don't know how to break this to you, but BSDI has already been merged with the fellas over at Walnut Creek. As of FreeBSD 5.0, BSD/OS won't exist anymore.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • The best thing SCO could do right now is to free the trademark "Unix"
    SCO doesn't own the trademark, the X/Open Consortium does. Novell donated it to them several years ago. X/Open will license it to any system that can pass the Spec 1170 suite of compatibility tests. That's how DEC OSF/1 became Digital Unix.
    --
  • I'll go rescue him. Why don't you stay here and work in my system kernel?
  • I mean, come on! SCO has what has got to be the crappiest and most overpriced commercial UNIX distribution EVER! I had to deal with them a decade ago and I found their pricing scheme to be confusing and annoying (As if paying over $1000 for the OS alone wasn't annoying enough.) I found their tools to be primative even by the standards of the day.

    I have to work with their UNIX every so often now and not one damn thing has changed. At least these days it's easy to snarf GCC down and compile the gnu stuff for it. My only regret is that I can't convince my department to drop support for them completely and pick up a more worthy UNIX (Like DG/UX. Man they rock...)

  • I don't understand why everyone on Slashdot seems to be dancing around singing "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" (SCO's obviously not dead, but everyone seems to be so overjoyed at the prospect anyway) ...

    I like open source software as much as the next guy--it's great to have access to the code, as a programmer. It's also nice to get things free of charge. But one thing we have to admit is that Linux isn't anywhere near the point at which it can rival any of the major Unix systems in actual performance. Maybe some day it will be, I'm not sure. The major benefit of Linux (to businesses) seems to be cost at the moment. So why are you all so happy about a Unix system dying? Can't open source co-exist with these other things? Especially when Unix is so damned good.

    And another thing. I don't think I'd personally want to see Linux do better than all the Unix systems, or even equal them. Because if it equals them, but it's free of charge, it will beat them. A world where there's only one operating system is not a world in which I'd want to use computers. When we have just one operating system, we have no competition, and most of the drive for innovation is lost, plus there's nowhere to run if you don't like something. I've always thought Unix fragmentation was a good thing, not bad.

    I'm not about to start arguing the virtues of non-open source software; I do like and use open source software every day. But when I first started using it, I really thought it was absurd that anyone took software so seriously as to think there should be this whole philosophy surrounding it. I mean, it's just software. It's a tool. And having a philosophy about it is like having a philosophy about a screwdriver. (I know I'm going to get attacked for that) In any case, the way this relates to the story is that I think a lot of the reason so many people are posting so happy about this is that they're like "Oh, great, another piece of proprietary software dead!"

    I find this really, really sad. I love and respect Unix.

    Flame me as much as you want, but I am one of the few Linux users who really really loves and respects the CDE--because unlike most Linux users, I took the time to learn about the technology behind it instead of just saying "Oh, it's proprietary, it must be evil" ... I have yet to see one Linux user explain why CDE's technology is bad, but I see them every day talking ignorantly about it and making tons of false statements about it... why? Because it's proprietary, I assume. But I think it's a really good product, and, like Unix, it's irrational and sad to want it to die because you can't see the code (when you probably wouldn't use it anyway) and cause you have to pay some money for it.

    I like open source software. But I don't believe the "philosophy". I like Unix too. I like a lot of technology, open source or not. Why do we have to do this? Why does there have to be such enmity toward stuff like this?

    When I see IBM, SCO, SGI & co chasing after Linux, it sickens and saddens me. Not because I don't like Linux, but because I love Unix. I want these things to co-exist. I don't want one of them, driven by cost and massive hype, to kill all the others. If anyone should be pro-choice in operating systems, it should be Linux people.

    I just don't understand.

  • > And their OS is so bad compared to an advanced
    > multi-user OS like linux.

    I agree with the sentiment, but I question your
    qualification to pass judgement on their product
    if you don't realize they don't have one single
    operating system.

    To be more specific, they are *currently* selling
    Openserver 5.0.5, Unixware 2.1.3 and Unixware
    7.1.1 (and yes, that is a different operating
    system that Unixware 2.1.x).

    IMHO, their products really aren't terribly good,
    but mine is an informed opinion, having done
    support on all three operating systems as well as
    their previous products (SCO UNIX, SCO OpenServer
    3.0, SCO OpenDesktop 3.0, SCO Xenix) and holding
    every certification they currently offer.

    And it should be said that at least one of their
    operating systems does have some advantages over
    Linux. Unixware currently scales better, supports
    larger files and filesystems out of the box, has
    a proven extent-based journeled filesystem (vxfs),
    as well as a few other niceties.

    That being said it is flaky as hell, over-priced,
    has a confusing licencing structure, has limited
    hardware support, limited ISV support, and is
    generally harder to work with than any of the
    free Unices on Intel.

  • Because if it equals them, but it's free of charge, it will beat them. A world where there's only one operating system is not a world in which I'd want to use computers.
    Am I wrong, or is Linux not just a term for any O/S that originated with Linus' Torvalds miraculous creation? An OS which follows the rules of Open-Sourcing and free distribution that Torvalds set out to make a standard?
    Look at the GUIs for Xfree86, does Linux not resemble Windows now? In the very near future, we'll be able to run all of our favourite windows-only apps on a Linux OS. Yet it's Linux, it's open-source, there's a million different unique distros and tweaks to run the software under, and yes it's free.
    Each distribution is free to make whichever changes they wish to the operating system, and with open-sourcing and all the different distributors out there (Corel being the latest and greatest as an in-between for home users). I don't think it's fair to treat Linux as a single operating system, capable of being developed like all other software we use today. It's unique because Linux is always going to strive to encompass what everybody wants in an OS, and it does it fast, and it implements it in unique ways.
    Why not have a replacement for every operating system that's free? If every OS were Linux, it doesn't mean they wouldn't be subject to Darwinian law. They would be even more so, because they are Open-Sourced.
    After all, there is no reason a particular distributer can't change a particular file-system, interface, add new utilities, remove old utilities, and still distribute there software as Linux; though it looks different, stores files differently, does wholly new things, and doesn't perform the most common old applications. If it makes sense to come up with a distribution like that, it will be done, it will be weighed against all the others, and it will fail or succeed based on its virtues.
    The name doesn't mean anything, if it's a whole new OS.

  • They should get a clue... (Score:3)

    by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisum@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday March 22, 2000 @06:37PM (#1181274) Homepage Journal
    ... and open-source (GPL/LGPL) Tarantella, thus propelling them to the forefront in the thin WinClient market.

    Otherwise, I give 'em a year. They've lost the Intel/Unix OS battle, with Linux and BSD and other freely available *nixes cutting into their market. That leaves Tarantella, and in that regard they're competing against Microsoft...

    So the only thing I figure they can do is get on the OSS bandwagon as soon as possible. I dunno what else they could do to maintain any form of economy.

  • Re:About reliability. (Score:3)

    by PureFiction ( 10256 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2000 @08:38PM (#1181275)
    Actually, well built systems are more reliable than people. Always are.

    There is a lot of interest in the airline industry these days concerning the possible use of fully automatic flight systems for commercial and other flights. These systems have been shown to be more reliable, and the level of fault tolerance is impressive (it better be...).

    Initially pilots would still be there to baby sit the autopilot.. but it would handle take off, flight, landing.

    Some companies are even proposing no pilots whatsoever and solely automated flight systems.. Though I doubt that will catch any time soon.

    So, as far as safety and ability in a statistical sense, computers always outperform humans in such critical tasks. The higher the time sensitivity and complexity, the larger their advantage.

  • Re:Why the joy over this? (Score:3)

    by King Babar ( 19862 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @07:00AM (#1181276) Homepage
    And another thing. I don't think I'd personally want to see Linux do better than all the Unix systems, or even equal them. Because if it equals them, but it's free of charge, it will beat them.

    The mind boggles. The reason why competition is considered a Good Thing is it produces better products that people want at lower costs. In the case of Linux or *BSD versus Unix(tm), it is clear that Unix(tm) has a cost disadvantage. So, in order for Unix(tm) to retain market share, people really have to want it. In the particular case of SCO, if SCO can be (or could have been) a service organization that people would be willing to pay for, then...they'd pay for it.

    A world where there's only one operating system is not a world in which I'd want to use computers. When we have just one operating system, we have no competition, and most of the drive for innovation is lost, plus there's nowhere to run if you don't like something. I've always thought Unix fragmentation was a good thing, not bad.

    I think you miss the point almost completely. You suggest that it's nice to have a diversity of operating systems, and I think most people agree with that. Now think of what Unix fragmentation was really about. It wasn't about competition. It couldn't have been. I forget which sage said this, but the rule has always been:

    Competition does not consist of being different, but, rather, of being the same.

    Now think of why we had Unix fragmentation: because they ran on different hardware, and vendors had a motive for making it difficult to switch platforms once you'd developed for [name of company here]. Suppose you'd liked Irix for some reason, but wanted to run it on your bullet-proof HP box: couldn't do it. You had to run HP/UX. HP/UX and Irix themselves did not compete, rather the hardware/software monoliths sort of competed. But even there, the companies took great pains to develop their own little market niches because by being different, they didn't have to compete.

    OK, so now what happens when Linux gets ported to a new platform? Yup, you now have some real competition: for Digital Unix or Solaris/x86 or what have you to survive, they have to be better than, better supported than, or cheaper than Linux. If they are none of these things in a given niche, then they will (and should) die.

  • Screw em (Score:3)

    by Zoltar ( 24850 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @04:23AM (#1181277)
    Wasn't the CEO of SCO one of thoese bozo's who was blasting Linux about a year ago...hmmmm lets go here [www.xos.nl] for a quick read ... then hop over here [computerworld.com] for more.

    Here's my favorite quote from the brilliant SCO CEO:

    Q: Do you consider Linux friend or foe?

    A: Linux is a religion. It's like considering the Catholic Church a competitor. I'm not a religion; I'm a commercial operating system.


    Hmmmm... so now they are tanking in a major way and singing a different tune. Well, I guess maybe they should have been a little more forward thnking about a year ago. I say screw em, if you refuse to change with the times you will get left behind. I would think that a "smart" CEO would try to capaitalize on the popularity of Linux ( like IBM did.. ) instead of burying you head in the sand and acting like you are the shit. So now they are going to reorganize... hhmpf.

  • SCO solves some problems very well... (Score:3)

    by philiph ( 63129 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2000 @07:10PM (#1181278) Homepage

    It just goes to show that people who post replies here don't know dick about operating systems. I was a engineering consultant and software engineer for 3 years at SCO, so I think I can say I know a bit about the company. Well, here's the big surprise: some of their stuff sucks, and some of it works really well.

    That isn't a surprise to anyone who really knows about the computer industry - companies all have problems. SCO's marketing is horrible - they can't sell their way out of a paper bag. Yet, people keep buying it. You know why? Because SCO OpenServer 5.x is one of the most stable and reliable Intel OS platforms you can buy. It just works, and it works forever.

    Course, it's not the fastest, or the slickest, or the coolest. You really think the business world cares about all the nifty little features in Linux? They don't - they care about the bottom line. When you need stability, SCO can deliver.

    So maybe you're thinking I'm some sort of SCO evangelizer? No. I don't use SCO products at all now that I've left the company. I use Linux and FreeBSD. Since I'm not running a bank, I am willing to sacrifice some reliability for all the cool little features you get with these OSes. Plus, FreeBSD is at least as stable as SCO OpenServer.

    Finally, let me note that you can run all the Open Source goodies on SCO platforms. I was one of the developers who worked very hard to make that happen. Check out SCO Skunkware [sco.com] for the details.

  • Re:SCO solves some problems very well... (Score:3)

    by Wdomburg ( 141264 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2000 @09:49PM (#1181279)
    >It just goes to show that people who post replies
    >here don't know dick about operating systems.

    Agreed. :)

    > Yet, people keep buying it. You know why?

    Because of a large number of vertial market applications which haven't been ported to other platforms, such as Medical Manager, MAS/90, etc.

    >Because SCO OpenServer 5.x is one of the most
    >stable and reliable Intel OS platforms you can
    >buy. It just works, and it works forever.

    *ahem* SCO does not "just work" by any means of the imagination. I have spent the last two years supporting the platform and there are an ungodly number of bugs to it.

    For example, since 5.0.0 I have seen the mkdev tape script completely fubar the link kit if you try to remove a tape drive that was misconfigured.
    You'd think that *thinks* 6 or 7 years would be long enough to fix that, wouldn't you?

    Or network printing being completely broken out of the box on Openserver 5.0.5.

    Or virtual domains showing up multiple times in the Internet Manager. Another bug that they have officially said they will never fix in the current release.

    Or the problems with the new parallelized init scripts used in Openserver 5.0.4 and 5.0.5? (Mostly I have seen some of the scripts launched into the background ignoring the SIGALRM, thus hanging init.)

    Granted, if you get it set up, and then don't poke at it much, it will run for a good long time.

    > When you need stability, SCO can deliver.

    I take exception to this as well. Look at Unixware 7.0. Look at Unixware 7.1. Look at Webtop 1.0. Look at Webtop 1.1. Look at NSC 7.1.0.

    The NSC (Non-Stop Clustering) being the worst example, as it is supposed to be a high availability solution. Yet we have had two total failures of the entire cluster without a hardware fault.

    > Finally, let me note that you can run all the
    > Open Source goodies on SCO platforms.

    Unfortunately last time I checked they had cripled the version of GCC on skunkware to only use the SCO linker by changing the -B flag to be binary time (e.g. COFF or ELF) instead of what the GNU binutils package accepts.

    And ignoring the fact that if it isn't on Skunkware getting ANY package to compile against SCO is akin to flaying off skin and rubbing salt into the wound because of the variety of quirks in many of the SCO APIs and the gaping holes in others.

    Not to say that SCO doesn't have its advantages. But the cost of implementing SCO far outweighs any benefits. And in many ways it is inferior to the free variants of Unix.

  • Re:Does this REALLY surprise anyone? (Score:3)

    by Wdomburg ( 141264 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2000 @07:00PM (#1181280)
    > I had to deal with them a decade ago and I
    > found their pricing scheme to be confusing and
    > annoying.

    It still is. As part of my job I unfortunately
    have to do pre-sales configs on SCO servers.

    Customer: I need a copy of SCO Unix.

    Me: Openserver 5, Unixware 2 or Unixware 7?

    Customer: Can you give me parts for all three?

    Me: Well, if its Openserver, we would need to know
    if they want host edition, enterprise edition,
    or desktop edition. We would also need to
    know how many users they have, as well as how
    many processors the machine has.

    Customer: Oh. What about Unixware 2?

    Me: Unixware 2 is a little easier. We would need
    to know whether they want the application
    server or the personal server. And again we
    would need a user and a processor count.

    Customer: Hrmm... Is Unixware 7 any easier?

    Me: No, actually its worse. This one has a lot
    more editions - base, business, departmental,
    enterprise and data center.

    Customer: How do we know which one to get?!?

    Me: It depends on how many users, the number of
    CPUs, how much memory you have, whether you
    need Windows file and print serices, whether
    you need a bundled backup software, whether
    you need a volume manager...

    Customer: Nevermind. I'll call my customer back
    and get more information.

    And that isn't even dealing with upgrades, which
    are even messier.

  • The Joy of Tools (Score:4)

    by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2000 @10:21PM (#1181281)
    I'm not about to start arguing the virtues of non-open source software; I do like and use open source software every day. But when I first started using it, I really thought it was absurd that anyone took software so seriously as to think there should be this whole philosophy surrounding it. I mean, it's just software. It's a tool. And having a philosophy about it is like having a philosophy about a screwdriver. (I know I'm going to get attacked for that)
    You've summoned a theme that shows up occasionally in Slashdot discussions where two OS' are compared. The theme can be summarized as "An Operating System is a tool. How can you be passionate about a tool?"

    I can only guess that those who ask this question are not craftsmen, nor have they spent time around one.

    To a layman, a tool is a tool. A cheap, shoddy screwdriver does as good a job as a well-crafted expensive one. Heck... a hammer might do as well.

    But the right tool means much more to a craftsman. A craftsman has a much better understanding of their work than a layman and is therefore capable of doing a lot more; assuming they have the right tools. Good tools might enable a craftsman to get a particular job done faster. They might enable the craftsman to do better quality work. Or they may be the requirement the craftsman needs to be able to do the work to begin with. Take away his tools and a craftsman's work suffers. It is therefore not surprising a craftsman can be very particular about their tools. They may even be passionate about them.

    This idea is universal. You can apply it to any situation where a tool is used by skilled hands.

    I drive my car to work daily and think little more of it. I even occasionally manage to get regular maintenance done on time. For me, the car is a practical tool I use to get around in. A friend of mine spent almost every weekend tweaking his car. And it showed. His car performed much better than mine ever had. It was even apparent when he offered to work a bit on my car. He was passionate about cars. I wasn't. But I knew if I needed help with my car, I could turn to him (and he had a heck of a tool box too).

    When I started playing paintball, I did fine with a rental paintgun. But as I played the sport more and my proficiency increased, I bought my own. It was a better quality model than the rentals. And I would tweak it. I customized parts. I kept up on all the latest info on getting the most performance out of my gun. You'd almost think the sport itself was all about building paintguns. But ultimately, it was how you performed on the field. Having a paintgun that performed just the way I wanted it to without fail was vital to that peformance.

    So what about the IT world?

    Whether we administer networks and the systems that make them, or develop applications and operating systems... we are all craftsman. We have a level of skill that exceeds the layman. We know the differences between various operating systems and applications. We know the intricacies of using those tools. Performing our craft is much easier when we have access to well-made tools that provide the power that we need to do our work and that we are familiar with. Without those tools, our work suffers. Why shouldn't we be passionate about them?

  • Excerpt from the EULA... (Score:5)

    by iCEBaLM ( 34905 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2000 @07:15PM (#1181282)
    I got an SCO Unixware 7 "media pack" with the "Free" Unixware 7 license awhile ago, and reading the EULA, this blew me away...

    This really is an excerpt from the EULA, I am NOT, I repeat, am NOT making this up...

    RESTRICTIONS
    The Software is not designed or intended for use in on-line control of aircraft, air traffic, aircraft navigation or aircraft communications; or in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility. In addition, the Software is not intended for any activity relating to the design, development, production, sockpiling or use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or missiles. SCO's disclaimer of any express or implied warranties as stated above applies to such uses as well as all others. You agree that You will not knowingly use the Software for such purposes

    Now come on, can it really be any good if I cant use it to control that brand new B1 bomber I bought, or stockpile my nuclear weapons? Give me a break! Yet another reason for Linux! :)

    -- iCEBaLM

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