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An Objective Review of UnixWare 7.1.4 224

Posted by timothy from the newsforge-and-slashdot-are-both-ostg dept.
Roblimo writes "Yes, SCO is evil and all that, but in between lawsuits it still puts out a product called UnixWare. NewsForge decided to review the latest version -- 7.1.4 -- just like we would any other Unix-based operating system. To ensure impartiality, we hired respected freelancer Logan G. Harbaugh, who wrote: 'On the server side, UnixWare Enterprise edition is more expensive for 150 users than either Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition, any of the Enterprise Linux distributions, or Solaris, with fewer available applications, fewer drivers for recent HBAs and other new hardware, and no currently available 64-bit version for either Opteron or Itanium processors.'"
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An Objective Review of UnixWare 7.1.4 More

An Objective Review of UnixWare 7.1.4

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  • objective? (Score:2, Funny)

    by rjhall ( 80887 )
    From reading the comment, I'm not so sure...

    • Re:objective? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jerw134 ( 409531 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:39PM (#9934893)
      Why? Just because someone casts Windows in a favorable light, they automatically lose their objectivity?

    • Re:objective? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GeorgeMcBay ( 106610 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:52PM (#9934998)
      Sounds pretty objective to me. The author's point is simply that the price seems out of whack with reality, and objectively that is absolutely correct. SCO needs to make a strong case as to what you're getting for the extra money when compared to Windows, Solaris, Linux (Enterprise Linux, with paid support), or any other OS you might choose. Nothing I've heard from SCO or seen for myself leads me to believe the price is justified compared to the competition. The support isn't significantly better. The reliability isn't significantly better. The number of available applications is much worse. Etc. And then you have the whole "will this company be around in a couple years" problem with SCO. Even ignoring the lawsuit fiascos, they've had a number of other business-related problems as of late (with Baystar, etc) that would pretty much ensure I'd never choose an SCO solution for a new project, even if it were cheaper instead of more

    • Re:objective? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by magarity ( 164372 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:04PM (#9935069)
      From reading the comment, I'm not so sure

      So, exactly which part of "more expensive" and "fewer drivers" are not 100% quantifiable and objectively measured criteria? This is the measure of an objective interviewer, rather than comments like "The install process was confusing" and "The GUI sucked!"

    • Re:objective? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:34PM (#9935268) Homepage Journal
      You're watching too much FoxNews. "Objective" doesn't mean "slavish devotion to the subject". It means "without self-selecting bias regarding the subject". The human capacity for the true "objectivity" usually attributed to journalists and scientists is possible only perhaps in machines, or more likely in objects untouched by humans. But who wants to hear what they think?

  • Infringes on Linux IP! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:40PM (#9934902)
    I hear it infringes on Linux IP.

    Rumors are that many lines of source code are in common with Linux; and so far all the lines identified actually belonged in Linux.

    The only natural conclusion is that these guys stole them.

    SCO, Please pay Linus $699,000 for every copy you sell.

    • Well...if anything infringes on the GPL (basically SCO included anything GPL Licensed and didn't include source code) wouldn't the remedy be that SCO has to open source their software??? ooooh the delicious irony....

      • Re:Infringes on Linux IP! (Score:5, Informative)

        by Pharmboy ( 216950 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @07:50PM (#9935711) Journal
        Well...if anything infringes on the GPL (basically SCO included anything GPL Licensed and didn't include source code) wouldn't the remedy be that SCO has to open source their software??? ooooh the delicious irony....

        No. See the actual license [gnu.org] This is far from what would happen.

        As I understand it(IANAL), any GPL software that they include must have the source available (but only to the people THEY distributed the binaries to) by any reasonable means (mail for cost of media+handling, ftp, http, etc) or they have no authority to distribute it. It would not effect their proprietary software.

        If they refused to make source to the same people they made binaries available to, they would be in violation of the GPL, and would have to stop distributing those GPL packages. A judge would have to decide if their actions constitute infringement on the owners copyright in a case brought to the court by the actual copyright holder. At that point, a judge would issue an injuction, disallowing SCO from distributing the one (or more) packages named in that specific suit. Other damages may be awarded, theoretically, but rarely.

        At any time (and possibly at the last minute) they could agree to allow access to their modified GPL source, and the case would be more or less moot. They would instantly be in compliance with the license. Still, it has no bearing on their own closed source applications.
        • Seems to me that they would be liable for any sales incurred under a period of time in which they were non-compliant with the GPL. Such a scenario screams for a fat settlement check.

    • Re:Infringes on Linux IP! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      at $699,000 a copy, linus would still be making a whole whopping $0

  • Of course your product is going to be inferior (Score:4, Insightful)

    by guitaristx ( 791223 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:43PM (#9934929) Journal
    ...when you replace developers with lawyers.

  • Where would UnixWare be without OpenSource? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GGardner ( 97375 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:44PM (#9934931)
    The new 7.1.4 version adds a number of new capabilities to UnixWare, including the common Unix printing system (CUPS), GIMP-print printer drivers, ESP Ghostscript PostScript and PDF interpreter and renderer, URW++ fonts, Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.4.2, J2SE runtime environment, the Java Communications API 2.0, PostgreSQL 7.4.2, MySQL 3, Samba 3.0, Cdrtools, OpenLDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), and Compaq and Intel PCI hot-plug drivers.

    The funny thing is, for as much as our friends at SCO are threatened by OpenSource, OS is the only way that they can compete with larger entities like Sun and HP. Look at how many of the above list of new "features" are simply OSS ports. Think of how much work it would have been for SCO, and their handful of engineers to recreate these ports from scratch.

    • I think there really need to be another open source licence at this point.

      I would love to see a GPL for everyone but SCO, or even a GPL that states that if you file a patent/copyright suit against GPL software that you lose your rights to use/modify it.

      I know this would be a slippery slope and not in the true spirit of the GPL, but it really pisses me off to see SCO doing what they're doing to Linux and then tout there new OS which includes a whole bunch of Open Source software!!

      • Re:Where would UnixWare be without OpenSource? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:08PM (#9935098)
        I know this would be a slippery slope and not in the true spirit of the GPL, but it really pisses me off to see SCO doing what they're doing to Linux and then tout there new OS which includes a whole bunch of Open Source software!!
        Making decisions based solely on the fact that you're pissed off is a bad idea. This sort of restriction would only hurt open source; it wouldn't help anyone.
      • I know how you feel, but I still think it's a bad idea to do that. I mean, ignore this SCO situation and the other ridiculous lawsuits, and it's easy to imagine a company that uses GPL products having a legitimate legal complaint against an open source software author (i.e. the author really did outright steal from them).

        A clause like that just wouldn't work. I mean, really, it's not even worth discussing further once you think about it for a bit.

      • Apache License 2.0 (Score:2, Informative)

        by Thumpnugget ( 142707 )
        There is sort of something like this out there. The Apache License 2.0 [apache.org], section 3:

        3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are ne
      • First, this would likely be legally unenforceble, which is why it is not possible to add it to the license. I am pretty sure that you cannot make someone agree to not sue you, which is what this would amount to. Besides, how do you even put something like that into precise terms?

        Also, free software is just that, and discriminating against users will simply make it non-free. What if I decide to refuse to license my software to people who buy Microsoft products? Or to people who openly support Bush? The

      • You need to read the GPL again. As far as I'm aware, SCO lost their rights to ship GPL software when they started suing over other people using the same GPL software.

        Is there some reason the EFF isn't suing SCO for breach of license? Not theft of IP, not alleged copyright violations, but blatant sale of products they've lost license rights to.

  • So, in other words (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mhesseltine ( 541806 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:44PM (#9934934) Homepage Journal
    1. It costs more than competitive offerings.
    2. It runs fewer applications
    3. It doesn't support newer hardware
    4. It has a convoluted pricing structure

    After looking at these points, why are we to assume that SCO is losing money because of Linux infringing on their IP? Isn't it more likely that SCO has just lost touch with the market, and has been passed up by better competitors?

    • Re:So, in other words (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:12PM (#9935123) Homepage
      We can assume exactly that. And, we can also assume that they have no interest in upgrading the quality and functionality of their offerings, because they are not in the business of selling software.

    • Re:So, in other words (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )
      **After looking at these points, why are we to assume that SCO is losing money because of Linux infringing on their IP? Isn't it more likely that SCO has just lost touch with the market, and has been passed up by better competitors?**

      well in all fairness most of the competitors are linux based(in sco dreamworld they would have the only unix-like system on x86, where pesky things like hardware support and cost wouldnt matter).

    • Isn't it more likely that SCO has just lost touch with the market,

      No no no. Not the market... it's reality, they've lost touch with reality.
    • No.

  • I find it amusing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Talez ( 468021 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:45PM (#9934937)
    That SCO is proclaiming the GPL to be the world's greatest evil while still shipping a billion GPL applications in the box.

    Or maybe it just thinks it "owns" the applications as well?

  • Other than Evil Company and Badly Written software (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MrChuck ( 14227 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:45PM (#9934940)
    how was it?

    And yes, I had lots of clients that used Xenix. And after a LOT of pain, they figured out that SunOS on a $15k sun was cheaper than Xenix on a $3000 386/25.

    My friend still hates me for making him setup an early Unixware and it's NIS/YP "implementation" (rsh to master, copy files over, merge with local ones, done. That's like NIS, right mr customer?)
    We tossed it for being grossly unsecure, even on a trusted LAN; slow and bad.

    Oh, and the switch was set to Evil (but we didn't know it then).

    • I've used Xenix, Open Desktop, Open Server, and fairly recent versions of SCO UNIXware. I like Xenix the best of the lot.

      The original UNIXware when Novell had it was pretty good, actually. Not like your typical commercial UNIX, because it didn't have nearly as much BSD influence as most of the survivors, but it did the System V thing as well as anything I've used. Don't expect it to be real happy in a BSD/Sun/Linux environment, but off by itself or surrounded by Windows or Netware boxes it was pretty solid. And, after all, that's what they sold it for.

      The version I used after it had been in SCO's hands had an awful lot of Open Server in it, and it suffered from the transplant. The biggest problem was that the system just had too many different subsystems and components each with their own configuration interfaces all hidden behind their clumsy (but not much worse than other CDE-ish front ends I've used) GUI configuration tools. The result was that when things went wrong it was terribly difficult to diagnose.

      This isn't something that you're likely to notice until you'd actually been using it in production a while, unless you had the bad (or is that good) luck to step on a crack in the initial install.

      Back when it was Xenix, particularly the early versions, it was a lot more coherent and internally consistent. They really did start out with a pretty good system for the market they were selling into.

      • Re:Other than Evil and Badly Written, why? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MrChuck ( 14227 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @11:34PM (#9936709)
        Mediocre to bad software backed by really poor customer support.

        What made strong impressions on me was events line:
        client has 10 xenix boxes. Client gets some network cards because they FINALLY want them to talk to each other. So they spent several hundred $$$/machine for cards, a bunch of Coax and 10 copies of Xenix TCP/IP software. I got to install.

        I spend the day working on the boxes, I'd pull the software, install, do the licensing, leave the license card. A little waiting for machines, so I run wires, and it's getting done.

        Oh, but the machines (all?) spew an "alert" that there is a duplicate key in use.

        Somewhere, I put the same key in twice.
        We call SCO. We get told (on Mon) that someone will "call you back before Thursday."

        Uh... no. surrounded by shrink wrap and a someone upset client...

        No love. I have to uninstall everything, reinstall. Another several hours.

        Next day, things network! Woo hoo! but...

        They login by project name. But they can't RCP. or rlogin. We put on passwords (isolated network in a secure room, no passwords). Kinda a PITA.
        Oh, project "pacific1" won't rsh/rlogin still. Nor a couple others. Still waiting for the "brand new customer" + VAR support call back.

        The CAD support people come through (ArrisCAD rules!). Seems "8 letter login names won't work. We know, it's stupid; we agree. Oh, and you can't extract the TCP software license key," so if I keep waiting for support, they'll tell me to do what I did.

        -----

        This sort of action was repeated over and over. When, later, UnixWare (1992ish) was foisten on me, the hole bad hack of YP and mounting NFS and every painful step just burned into my brain more and more that this was a Unix half owned by Microsoft and its sole purpose was to make people like DOS and Windows 3.0

        As soon as BSDI could run SCO binaries, I called the remaining (former clients) who still were stuck with SCO for some software lockin.

        I will maintain that the ONLY reason SCO classic sold stuff through the late 80s was because of software that only ran on it. And those people got locked in because it was the only unix that could run on a 286 back in the day.

        Move forward and the way to make money from SCO is to "pump and dump" - lawsuits about non-existent intellectual IP and the price goes up enough to sell a bunch of stock and pocket some cabbage.

        Sure, the JFS that IBM brought from OS/2 came from SCO. Right, I'll get on that. And the rest of the rot.

        Bad company that became obsolete (not EVERYBODY stopped innovating, mr sco) and got bought by a genius from Novell (remember when Novell I ruled the world doing the equiv of a stateful NFS and lpr for $10,000).

        Evil company; costly yet mediocre software.

        • Aha. They must have added that obscene level of licence abuse between the last version of Xenix I used and the first version of SCO Open Desktop, because our Xenix didn't have anything like that in it.

          Come to think of it, it was still labelled "Microsoft Xenix".

          So perhaps in this case Microsoft is actually innocent: the evil came in after it left their bailiwick.
  • The article might be objective, but he who submitted the story does not seem to be quite so objective.

    Of course, I haven't read all of TFA, so perhaps I'm doing "Roblimo" an injustice :)

  • Yeah (Score:3)

    by Erwos ( 553607 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:47PM (#9934959)
    I mean, let's face it... no one's going to be using SCO any more. This isn't more than a PR stunt by Newsforge.

    Still, I appreciate it. With all the whines about SCO the litigator running about, it was interesting to read what SCO the software company was producing.

    -Erwos

  • Merge - Win4lin (Score:5, Informative)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:48PM (#9934966) Journal
    I was in a unixware shop many years ago, and the best thing I like about it was a piece of software called Merge. But a couple years ago, Win4lin [netraverse.com], came out for Linux. This was back in the multi-cpu 486 days, made a great call center server with a hundred operators on it. Other than than the printer queue's fscking up, it was stable. But I was already running BSD for any server I was tasked to engineer.

    Today, I dont really see a reason to use unixware. The software is all GPL'ed software you can download on most platforms, and Solaris and Linux have better support.

    Just my 2cents.

  • Summary. (Score:4, Funny)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:48PM (#9934967)
    Dear SCO,
    It was a better effort than we expected of you.
    However, it still sucks.
    Respectfully,
    NewsForge

  • The ACTUAL summary... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:49PM (#9934977)
    Well, the actual introduction to the review reads:

    UnixWare 7.1.4 is the latest in a long line of Unix releases from The SCO Group. It is a stable and mature Unix, with a variety of basic servers included, such as the Apache Web server and Squid, and is available in both single-user desktop-oriented versions and server versions. It has reasonable support for hardware, good documentation, and a nice integrated management utility that offers unified administration of the OS, hardware, and servers. Performance as a server platform is good, supporting a number of TCP sessions and Web server users, and file transfer performance is competitive with Linux and Windows platforms. However, as a desktop OS or file/print server, UnixWare is hard to recommend over competitors.

    And the actual conclusion:


    UnixWare 7.1.4 offers some high quality Unix features including OS stability and security, disk replication, a decent GUI management package, Windows emulation, good documentation, and a reasonable suite of server applications. However, the relatively high prices for adding multiple users and CPUs, high cost of the support package, and relative dearth of available software since the LKP package was removed make UnixWare hard to justify as a file/print or mail server, or desktop OS. It would make a good Web server or application server.

    Doesn't sound quite as bad as the slasdot summary, does it?

    • Re:The ACTUAL summary... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by argent ( 18001 ) <(peter) (at) (slashdot.2006.taronga.com)> on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:09PM (#9935103) Homepage Journal
      Doesn't sound quite as bad as the slasdot summary, does it?

      No, but I'd like to hear from someone using it in production. I've been there, and unless they've pulled a lot of the stuff they added to the version of Unixware I last used back out again it's not nearly as good as it sounds.
      • I have ONE, count 'em, ONE client using Unixware. It's god awful!!

      • Unixware review from an actual user (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @09:39PM (#9936223)
        We use Unixware 7 at work. It was the system recommended by a specific software vendor at the time (and that is the only application we run on the box).

        We have been trying to identify the best migration plan for the following reasons:

        - SCO's lack of hardware makes upgrading a nightmare of its own. With Windows and Linux, I can buy virtually anything (server hardware, that is) and expect it to "just work".
        - The fact that SCO is at least at serious risk of collapse in the foreseeable future means that we now need to keep a copy of the hardware compatibility list and Unixware installation media in case of catastrophe (see point 1 and now imagine no tech support). This is a non-concern with any other reasonable alternative.
        - Documentation sucks. From man pages either being non-existent or missing critical information such as what files in /etc configure what services, this entire area of development is missing. Again, refer to points 1 and 2 and see what a nightmare this could potentially be.
        - Related to the last point, Unixware expects you to use the scoadmin tool to do everything, including configure network cards. The location of even a basic ifconfig file is well hidden. To make this matter worse, scoadmin is non-intuitive to maneuver and also does not support termcap/terminfo -- you must use an ANSI terminal or the display will be garbled. Our vendor provides a custom telnet application to ensure you are always in ANSI.
        - No support of PAM. We would like to simply integrate our logins with our Windows domain controller. Not possible with Unixware.

        The very recent adoption of open source tools is actually the best thing they've done. In the version we have installed, SCO included VisionFS which provides SMB shares but is just not the same quality as Samba. More recent versions have dropped VisionFS and added more open source tools.

        That's a quick review off the top of my head from somebody who uses it every day and looks forward to the day that we can be done with it.

  • Of course it's more expensive... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Amberlock ( 27439 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @05:52PM (#9934997) Homepage
    ... If you still want to make a profit, you have to charge more for your software when there's fewer people willing to buy it.

  • Wait !?!?!? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Izago909 ( 637084 ) *
    SCO produces software? This whole time I thought SCO was a law firm comprised of ludites. Their lawyers must be true renaissance men. I mean they put in a hard days work slandering Linux and sit down to write code and debug it at night.
    • SCO produces software? This whole time I thought SCO was a law firm comprised of ludites.

      I know I shouldn't be feeding the trolls, but...

      SCO, aka Caldera, used to produce one of the best Linux distro out there, called Caldera OpenLinux. And also one of the very first Linux distro. Not to mention, a neat Windows 3.11 emulator for Linux called Wabi, that actually sort of worked. Ironic eh?

      The bunch of lawyers you're talking about is their investment firm, the Canopy Group, and Ray Noorda. And they're not

  • Fuck Objectivity (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mateito ( 746185 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:01PM (#9935048) Homepage
    Ok, nice and all.. lets be objective.

    Sorry. As the systems/network engineer here, I get a fair amount of say in what goes and what doesn't, and even a bone-headed PHB (and I've got 2 out of three directors who fit that mould.. and I can say that here because I'm changing jobs anyway in a couple of months) can see that anything that makes as much noise as SCO is not a long term bet.

    Short of it: Doesn't matter if Unixware is great or crap if its not a cast-iron guarantee that the company will be around in 3 years to support the platform.

  • UnixWare comes with a C compiler

    No C++ compiler? That means one will have to install g++ first to be able to re-compile many free software... a lot depends then on how well gcc supports SCO

    While NeTraverse Merge 5.3.26c allows the UnixWare server to run Windows application all the way back to Windows for Workgroups 3.11, I found that Windows NT applications did not run in three out of four cases...

    Hmm, never heard of NeTraverse Merge... who develops it ? How does it compare with WINE?

    Anyway, I gue

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • NeTraverse Merge/Win4Lin (Score:4, Informative)

      by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @09:42PM (#9936241) Homepage Journal
      "Hmm, never heard of NeTraverse Merge... who develops it?"

      Netraverse [netraverse.com], of course. The Win4Lin people. Actually, Win4Lin and Merge are basically the same product.

      "How does it compare with WINE?"

      From a technical standpoint, we're talking apples and oranges. Wine is a project to independently implement a runtime environment that will be binary-compatible with Microsoft Windows. Win4Lin is an i386 virtualization tool tailored to run Microsoft Windows in a VM (virtual machine) on i386-based *nix.

      From a practical standpoint, both are useful. Wine is, of course, free, while Win4Lin is a commercial product. Wine does not require any Microsoft software; Win4Lin requires you to provide MS Windows (to install and run in the VM). Wine is trying to chase Microsoft's moving target; Win4Lin lets you run the real thing. Wine uses less resources. Win4Lin is far more compatible -- it works with most any non-multimedia application flawlessly.

      I use both. Win4Lin is extremely useful; it lets me run "the real thing" in a VM ("Windows in a window"), but with significantly better performance then VMware (doubtless because Win4Lin is tuned to just run Windows, while VMware is a full-blown, general-purpose VM). Wine yields better performance for applications which work with Wine. Win4Lin means no Wine compatability headaches; just install and run like a "real" 'doze box.

      FWIW, IMO, YMMV, HTH, HAND, etc.

      Here's the history behind Win4Lin/Netraverse, from my files:

      It appears the company which originally developed the Merge software was "Locus Computing Corporation". They marketed a product called "DOS/Merge", which is the ancestor to the Win4Lin that we all know and love. DOS/Merge was later called "386/Merge" when 386 protected mode support was added.

      At some point, a company called "Platinum" bought Locus. They apparently integrated Merge with other components into product lines called "PC-Enterprise" and "PC-Interface".

      The Merge product was licensed to several other companies, including SCO, Sun, and HP. Sun and SCO both have commercial Unix products that run on Intel hardware; they offer "SCO Merge" and "Sun Merge" as layered products for their Unixes. (SCO, of course, later sold major assets (including their name) to Caldera, and Caldera then changed their name to SCO.)

      At some point, a company called "DASCOM" bought the rights to Merge from Platinum. (Shortly thereafter, Platinum was bought by Computer Associates (CA), and fell off the Earth.) DASCOM was later bought by IBM. IBM was not interested in Merge, and spun the Merge group off as "TreLOS". TreLOS later merged with Lastfoot.com, and became "NeTraverse".

      So:

      Locus -> Platinum -> DASCOM -> IBM -> TreLOS + Lastfoot -> NeTraverse

      DOS/Merge -> 386/Merge -> PC-Enterprise & PC-Interface -> Win4Lin
    • The open edition of Xandros allows you to trial Netraverse's virtual machine.

      I have been running W98 (with latest patches), I use MS IE 6.0 and Suns Java VM latest version (need all this for work, I would not do that of my own volition) in my computer at home with Xandros and it works quite well. I added Apple's application for multimedia (sorry, I forgot its name, the famous one :-) ) and it works fine.

      If you need to use Windows occasionally this is an excellent solution (I believe they only support W98

  • So who's going to buy it? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:06PM (#9935083)
    Given SCO's behavior, really, I've got to wonder who'd purchase this. I'd think pretty much any Unix-leaning admin or CIO knows what SCO's been up to this past couple years, and will summarilly dismiss it whether it's good or not. Plus no Windows-leaning admin or CIO would buy it in the first place.

    So who is the target market?
    • They're targetting the corporate PHBs who for whatever reason hate linux, they then tell their admins what to use. Also sometimes a Windows admin will need a *nix system on their network for something... 8/10 Microsoft users prefer SCO for a health admin and a shiny coat
    • I believe there will be two types of buyers:

      1.) Legacy users. These people are wishing
      that they could migrate, but for some
      reason can't migrate at the present time.

      2.) MBA graduates who see the established
      SCO brand name and the traditional
      pricing to be indicative of a superior
      quality product.

      I believe that many Type 2 buyers quickly become Type 1 users.

  • OS (Score:4, Funny)

    by JollyTX ( 103289 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:10PM (#9935108)
    -I hate Open Source.
    -But you're using it in your own products!
    -The best there is!
    -But you just said you hated it!
    -But.. the you who.. I... It's... differeee.... (head explodes)

  • Has anyone tried buying a SCO product lately? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Proudrooster ( 580120 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:13PM (#9935125) Homepage
    Believe it or not, we are still nursing a few old SCO Openserver 5.0.x boxes along. Recently, I tried to purchase a SCO 5.0.8 because, I believe SCO is going to go belly up soon, and I wanted any last drivers they may have compiled into their O/S... I had to order the media and license separately. The SCO 5.0.8 media showed up, but the license has been backordered for about a month. It's really wierd that a piece of paper containing a license key could ever be on backorder. Maybe SCO fired their printer after all their NEW Linux license keys didn't sell.

    I just wondered if anyone else has experience has tried to purchase any SCO product lately and experienced anything similar. Also, if anyone has any unused SCO 5.0.8 licenses they want to sell, please let me know. We are going are best to move off of SCO, but unfortunately some of the old applications just won't DIE easily.
    • If someone in the open source / free software community really wanted to put the hurt on SCO, one idea would be to set up a website where current SCO customers desiring low-cost assistance to migrate away from SCO can anonymously post about the scope of the project needed to port their code or adapt their systems.

      Advocates wishing to help a SCO customer migrate away could search for projects in their local area, where the work is within their expertise. In the last week or so, at least a few articles hav

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:29PM (#9935238)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • On that note, Caldera was one of the first nice installs I saw (Red Hat was fugly!). Even let you play Tetris while it installed!

      Not that I like SCO today.
      • Ahh, I remember fondly playing tetris while installing Caldera OpenLinux Lite that came on a CD with a linux book I bought late '90s. *sigh*

        Caldera, what happened to you? How did you become what you became?

    • Re:For what it's worth... (Score:3, Informative)

      by ksheff ( 2406 )

      No publishers have ever taken much interest in writing specific books for it.

      You mean like this one [oreilly.com], this one [amazon.com], this one [amazon.com], even this one [amazon.com] or any of these? [addall.com]

      Sure, probably lots of those are re-treads from other Unix books and somewhat dated, but many books about other versions of Unix are like that too.

  • Bastards killed Unix (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:37PM (#9935287) Homepage Journal
    Unix, one of the peaks of engineering history, has fallen into the grubby paws of this band of hapless Utah lawyers. Of course coding is deprioritized - that only costs money, and is extraneous to the SCO business model. Help us, Obi-Wan, you're our only hope!

  • I've used unixware (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ShadowRage ( 678728 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:38PM (#9935294) Homepage Journal
    and let's just put it this way, linux is MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH better, hell, I'd use windows over that piece of shit. it's slow,(takes 10 minutes to boot on a 200 mhz) it's not flexible, lack of apps, and if you dont have the administrative password, you cant retrieve it. it also uses a ton of outdated shit as well, the version I played with still had a standard unix shell... argh I cant even begin to point out how fucked up it is.

    it's a waste, and SCO knows this. this is why they want linux to be theirs, they get some stock, they get a top quality system they never made, and they want it to be exclusive to them. unixware is simply a hack of SYSV unix, and sco openserver is much the same way.

    • Re:I've used unixware (Score:5, Funny)

      by AME ( 49105 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @07:02PM (#9935444) Homepage
      and if you dont have the administrative password, you cant retrieve it.

      Isn't that, like, a security feature or something?

  • An Objective Review of Bullshit 1.2.1 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Supp0rtLinux ( 594509 ) <Supp0rtLinux@yahoo.com> on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:40PM (#9935307)
    Hi. We're SCO. We don't believe in the GPL, but we include a host of GPL'd applications in our version of UNIX that no one other than those already using it (and those are just trying to move away from it) want.

    How to get fired: recommend software from a vendor who's source is closed and may not be around in the near future. No... I don't mean Microsoft. I mean SCO.

    The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers [nccomp.com]

  • Evolution (Score:5, Funny)

    by Supp0rtLinux ( 594509 ) <Supp0rtLinux@yahoo.com> on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:42PM (#9935320)
    If horseshit was seen growing legs by an evolutionist, they'd name the new species Darl.

    -5 Flamebait, but you can't hurt my karma :P

    The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers [nccomp.com]

  • The licensing problem is more than just money (Score:5, Interesting)

    by twigles ( 756194 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:43PM (#9935325)
    It's a huge pain in the ass. I've never seen a decent sized business (200+ people) without any software violations. It's just too hard to keep track of who owes what to whom and when it is going to expire. Not only is SCO's licensing expensive, it's pretty damn complicated too. Just look at the bottom of the article. The second half is all licensing details and I dare anyone to try and figure out their department's needs in less than an hour.

    So yeah, it is expensive, but it also looks like a rat's nest.

  • Seemed to be a "fair and balanced" review (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Secrity ( 742221 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @06:57PM (#9935413)
    The review seemed to be pretty vanilla, clued, thorough software review. The writer only looked only at the software that he was asked to review. Yeah, the review looked favorable -- as almost all software reviews do unless the software is total crap; reviewers tend to write about the good things. The part that I found really interesting was the level of detail (and the big numbers) included in the pricing information, most reviews show rather sketchy and incomplete pricing details. SCO prices everything ala-carte and seems to be going for the "we already got you by the balls" customers. What I took from the review was that the software is not necessarily crap but that you are going to pay for the privelege of using it.
  • in between lawsuits it still puts out a product called UnixWare

    You'd think it'd be rock-solid and bug free after so many releases!
  • fewer drivers for recent HBAs

    Please clue me in on what an HBA is.

  • Another objective review (Score:5, Informative)

    by tootlemonde ( 579170 ) on Tuesday August 10, 2004 @07:44PM (#9935674)
    See Unix Review [unixreview.com] for July, 2004. The conclusion:

    UnixWare 7.1.4, along with Red Hat, and Microsoft Windows Server, is undoubtedly one of the most stable operating systems available for the Pentium platform. It is a true version of Unix that allows you to use lower-priced hardware and get the results you would expect out of more expensive implementations.

    As such, it is a great choice if you are looking for an economic solution to a migration or new installation.

    There are a lot of interesting observations in the review, including:

    I tried my best to find ways to bring the operating system down and run it out of resources. For all of my attempts, I was unable to do so. It ran every legacy application that I could find from my earlier work with the operating system, and no errors cropped up. I purposely misconfigured some networking parameters in an attempt to hinder traffic, but these were immediately recognized and any administrator would have to agree that this is a solid operating system.

  • Unixware. Dead. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jregel ( 39009 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @02:04AM (#9937384) Homepage
    The company I work for supports Solaris, Unixware, Windows and AIX.

    We will be dropping Unixware at the end of next month. We will be supporting Linux from that point on. Even our SCO account manager stopped calling about 12 months ago.

    I personally quite liked Unixware. It was a strange OS, but it was another UNIX and something to play with.

  • on the standard of discussion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chegosaurus ( 98703 ) on Wednesday August 11, 2004 @04:57AM (#9937962) Homepage
    The clueless, pointless SCO baiting in this thread is depressing. You all hate them, but I don't think many of you know why. You gobble up propaganda and follow the flock like children. I'm so sick of uninformed narrow mindedness and sad fanboys that I rarely look at the discussions following Linux stories any more. How many ways are there to say "linux r0x0rs SCO is teh SUX!!!!". Don't you think we've got the message by now?

    Yes, this is flamebait, but there are plenty of people round here who deserve flaming. Say something interesting or say nothing at all. We know the party line. We don't need you to trot it out again and underline it with a Monty Python quote.

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