Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Unix Operating Systems Software

SCO does Linux 111

Posted by Hemos from the darnit-we-need-more-money dept.
lazlo gave us the heads-up-SCO is going to be offering Linux support now, in an attempt to boost revenue. It's funny how much things can change in only a few months.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

SCO does Linux More

SCO does Linux

Comments Filter:
  • Certainly compared to AIX, Solaris, Irix or HP-UX, UnixWare is less scalable. But it does scale well on much more CPUs and supporting much more disks and RAM [sco.com] than currently, for example, Linux or *BSD. (I think SCO OpenServer is SCOs current low-end OS). Linux will be there, too, one day, butyou have to get them credit that UnixWare 7 is a helluva OS (too bad Win2000 will try to get mindshare by showing much poorer performance). OK, now go ahead and flame :o)
  • well, i don't know about open/netbsd, but i'm looking at a Walnut Creek freebsd cd set (2.2.7, if it matters), and it has "unix" printed on it rather prominently on the front of the case and the spine, so i'd have to say that technically, it _is_ unix...
  • Good .. When RHAT drops in price, you will get the Linux faithfull buying in and holding on to it. Pushing the price back up again. It really has nothing to do with PE, RHAT will be a darling
    tech stock driven by a hatred of MSFT and hope for the children.
  • We're talking cash here. If i were putting money into a company, I wouldn't do it because it was the right thing to do. I would do it so as to maximize my profit earning potential. That's what the investors do. You shouldn't buy into a company solely because you like the company. You should buy into them because you believe that they are in a position to turn a profit where others can't. Redhat doens't have this differntiation. Sooner or later, these Linux companies are going to have to face the fact that they need to compete with each other rather than just against Microsoft. When that happens, I wonder if we'll start seeing proprietary software easing its way into the distributions...
  • It seemed to me that their CIO alone got 1.5 times more shares that are trading publicly... Even if you buy all of them - you will get a vote, but only one of a dozen...
  • It's wonderful to see SCO bow on bended knee to the peasants now (Linux). Not just SCO, but Sun, Novell, Apple, and a host of other arrogant OEMs that must now sit up and take note that Linux isn't going away!

    They're getting what they deserve. I am happy to see SCO, Sun, Novell, Apple, AT&T and all the other greedy OEMs now on bended knee to Linux.

    Like Linus, years ago, I too wanted to buy a copy of SCO or Interactive, or Solaris, and couldn't afford their price gouging.

    I wanted to learn Unix, and couldn't get a job doing Unix, because I couldn't afford to learn it, unless I was able to beg, borrow or steal time on a big Unix system.

    Linux has changed all this now, and I am grateful for what Linus has done.Linus did the right thing - roll your own!

    And I am laughing my ass off now that Sun has come crying to IBM to load Solaris on their RISC boxes.

    It's a great day now that all these giants are suffering. IBM is the only smart one in the bunch.

    It's the arrogance and ill will towards the end users who have to pay an arm and a leg for their technology that is doing these old giants in.

    Sure, Solaris and their big systems are great products, overpriced, but great products. And Sun will never make it to the desktop like Linux has. The only thing Scott has done is instilled a hatred for MS products into Solaris users, and created an army of elitist arrogant sysadmins.

    Look at Novell, invincible just a few years ago, now they need to explain to us all why they're still in business.

    You arrogant Solaris elitists, and all you SCO VARs, better get a copy of SuSE or RH and start learning Linux!

  • SCO/Linux (Score:3)

    by Arandir ( 19206 ) on Saturday August 14, 1999 @04:14PM (#1746392) Homepage Journal
    SCO Unix is going to be dead pretty soon, and it had nothing to do with SCO's previous attitude. What has happened is that Linux made operating systems a commodity. When Linux starts doing things that the big Unices do (real soon now), then Solaris, HPUX, etc., will be dying off also.

    I would suspect that in five or ten years, no is going to care what OS you use. Mix and match Linux/Hurd/etc with GNU/BSD/Etc with Gnome/KDE/UDE/etc as you see fit. It won't matter anymore. It will be like PC's today. It really doesn't matter much if you use Intel/AMD/Cyrix with Asus/FIC/etc MB's or with Seagate/WD/etc drives.

    SCO can certainly ride this OS shattering storm out. They have the expertise to do it. All they need is to join the community and make an SCO/Linux distribution. It would be a tempting distro, after all they've been in the i386/Unix business longer than anyone. Keep supporting SCO/Unix in your existing customer base, but realize that it will fade away.
  • MS may not have a services line item charge but look at the number of support calls and the cost of that and they're bundling a lot of "service" in that $90 Win9x price tag.

    Yep, DEC and IBM do/did tend to entice people with deep discounts. Of course these aren't the single license people either. If you're negotiating a $10m sale, you're given a little leeway in charges. I was sold several times as an onsite person for free to close deals but still the balance sheet numbers were black (in those days)
  • In the 20+ years I've been in the industry most serious computer companies have had services as a major line item on their balance sheets.

    Just as a point of interest, Microsoft Consulting is a break-even operation by design, and MS makes horks of money with no real services operation. (Novell operates in a similar manner.) This is one big reason there's lots of "MSCE Drones" out there - Microsoft shares the services pie, and generates alot of loyalty out of people and ISV's making their living on MS stuff.

    On the other hand, if you've ever been in a competitive services situation with you're traditional minicomputer operations like IBM or DEC Consulting (or others), you know that they'll win most everytime because they can throw licence and hardware discounts at the customer, and tend to cripple the products to make to make value-add services seem more enticing.

    I don't know about SCO in particular, but there does seem to be certain loyal ISV base out there (looking closely at Linux). Perhaps they're going to screw their 'friends' and try to monopolize the SCO consulting market and maybe pick up some Linux business too.

    (BTW, we'll really see how chummy-chummy RedHat, VA, and IBM are when they start underbidding each other for big Linux service deals.)
    --
  • You need to get a clue as to how companies need to adapt as they become bigger and bigger. It's no longer an issue as to how the Linux world works, it's an issue about money. If people buy into Redhat, and then see Redhat doing things that they don't think has to potential to maximize their investments, then they CAN sue Redhat. Or everyone can turn around and dump their stock, crippling them. Face it. If Redhat was on such great ground and could get limitless funds from Intel, Oracle, and whomever else, there'd have been no reason to go public at all. Now that they're public, they need to earn money, or at least have a consice plan as to how they will eventually earn money.
  • "What Apple had was a game machine"

    Well, they had 16 colors while IBM supported your choice of monochrome text or two entire palettes of four colors each. Plus a really braindead video memory interleaving scheme. Which system would YOU write games for?

    This doesn't prove serious software wasn't written for the Apple. For example -- VisiCalc, which is one of the most novel and important pieces of application software to come out of that time. You have heard of spreadsheets, right?

    BTW. I've never owned an Apple, though I had a lot of fun with a IIe a friend of mine had back then.

    Jim
  • Actually, SCO owns the copyright to the word
    "UNIX". I learned this in a SCO class that my
    boss and I took when I first started my job.
    (My job description said that I'd be coding in
    WinNT, which then moved to SCO, then RedHat, and
    now Debian. Not a bad progression, I'd say.)

    With regards to this whole SCO issue at large,
    I have to say it's pretty amusing. The problem
    with proprietary unices is that they are
    *discouraged* from putting out a distro with
    lots of variety in its programs. SCO doesn't
    want to offer gcc and egcs and all the rest,
    it wants to sell you its proprietary c compiler
    (and in trying to sell you a proprietary
    compiler, is discouraged from offering up a
    choice of compilers, as this would increase
    development costs). The same is true with window
    managers, and with shells, and editors, and
    mail/web/whatever clients. Why give you choice?
    Use the SCO window manager, the SCO shell! A
    free *nix distro has an incentive to giving you
    lots of choice, because switching to another
    distro is relatively trivial (as someone else
    could just repackage that distro with more
    choices).

    I got a free subscription to "SCO World" from the
    class, damn riveting reading that. It's
    interesting that SCO is now moving to Linux.
    As described in SCO World, they've been trying
    hard to push "Tarantella", an (IIRC)
    implementation of X in Java. I tried Tarantella
    once; it was slower than Reagan on a bad day.
  • Read up on the features that Unixware offers... Then compare it to Linux and you'll see that Linux has a lot of catching up to do... It'll get there evenutally, but not anytime soon. Unixware is much more scalable, etc...

    So far as this new business model works... I'm eager to see someone turn a profit with it. When that happens, I'll trust it to be permanent, but right now is way too early to say if selling only support for software is enought o sustain a company
  • So while they can say they have 80% of *UNIX on Intel*, they don't have 80% of the "UNIX or UNIX clone on Intel" market :).

    True, Linux and the free BSDs are not UNIX(tm), but Solaris is.

    I have a hard time believing that SCO has a userbase five times as large as Solaris/Intel.

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • Sure, Solaris and their big systems are great products, overpriced, but great products. And Sun will never make it to the desktop like Linux has. The only thing Scott has done is instilled a hatred for MS products into Solaris users, and created an army of elitist arrogant sysadmins.

    Now, I'm a pretty big Linux advocate, but...

    • There are free (or low-cost) licensing programs available for Solaris, UnixWare and SCO Open Desktop.
    • Linux still has scalability shortcomings compared to these UNIX(tm) operating systems.
    • It'd be my guess that most Solaris sysadmins also use (or at least) tinker with Linux and/or the free BSDs.
    I've heard a lot of bad things about SCO's UNIX(tm) operating systems. Having never had the opportunity to use any SCO stuff, I can't speak to its quality. I have worked with Solaris for several years, and know that it is a solid product (I hope I'm not too elitist or arrogant :-)). I generally like free software better, for many reasons, but I have to admit that there are still some advantages (perhaps not for much longer) to the commercial UNIX(tm)es.

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]
  • Sob...

    I saved a copy (at the time) because I knew it would be a priceless document when the linux wave
    splashed over the guys pointy little head (although he got convingly flambe'd at the time).

    But I think I've lost it :( Did anyone else keep a copy of this beauty?

    It also wasn't SCO, it was a SCO vendor.
  • How Redhat was having the potential to cause or actually causing fragmentation

    Not that much of a fragmentation, but of some not so bright decisions. Like RPM (vs DEB) or GNOME (brrr.. C based UI toolkit.. arghkkkh..)
    More and more decisions about Linux and GNU architechture will be decided from not pure technical point of view.
    As long as it stays GPL - not so bad.. Time will tell.

  • Re:The closest thing yet to MS support? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "I believe that SCO licensed parts of Xenix so that they could run Xenix binaries"

    That is almost the story. In the early 80's, the US Government insisted that vendors offer --IX in their GSA schedules. IBM, of course, wanted PCs to qualify so asked M$ to provide an SVID solution. M$ saw no future in UNIX, so subcontraced two Berkely guys with BSD expertise to get XENIX working on PCs (the Michaels brothers, I believe?).

    Once there was a PC XENIX to go on GSA, M$ and IBM were happy, but the subcontractors had bigger plans ... thus they turned SCO into a software product company with PR and Support as well as SVID/ BSD porting expertise. As part of that, they obtained licensing rights for XENIX and participated heavily with M$ in early tool development (x86 Compilers, Linkers, etc).

    In 86-87, SCO came out with the 32 bit version of XENIX (8 years before M$ unleashed x86 32 bit)and tech-savvy companies jumped on the big price advantages of 32 bit x86 over mini-computers.

    But pushing at the bottom of mini-computer space wasn't even a glimmer in M$ and IBM eyes when SCO took it on. They were having too much success in PC space between 82 and 92 to give it a second thought.

    I do not think M$ believed that -IX would be any competition for OS/2, and later Windoze, so I speculate that M$ invested in SCO so they could stay connected with the x86 32 bit expertise at SCO as SCO became increasingly successful.

    It should be very interesting to see the effect of the jump to 64 bit architectures. M$ and IBM got away with lagging 32 bit x86 architecture by 8 years. But the world is far too computer-literate to wait 8 years this time and I do not know what has changed at M$, with their massively larger product base, that would enable them to get from 32 to 64 bits in Windoze in much less time than it took them to get from 16 to 32 bits. Ready for double-thunk?

  • that would be great. UnixWare rocks, and some of the comments I have read in this forum are really shameful. Instead of using untrue, unpolite and sometimes plain rude comments, we should look at the strenghts of some of SCOs stuff. UnixWare supports more [sco.com] than Linux does today. (And Beowulf is not a viable solution for most processor-intensive applications, as the well-informed people know)
    And Tarantella is another gem.

    go ahead, flame...

  • IBM Entry Level Systems "invented" the 5150 PC that Q-DOS (Quick n Dirty OS), later known as MS-DOS/PC-DOS, ran on. Microsoft didn't "write" anything, except maybe that annoying dancing paperclip thing in the Office apps.

    If Bill Gates is responsible for anything, it is the presence of a hardware reset button on the front panel of virtually every Intel-based PC manufactured since the mid-1980s. Quite an accomplishment, huh. Have you ever considered the likelihood that PC manufacturers are more concerned about the MTBF rating on the reset switches they install than on the power switches?

    If Gates hadn't inserted his evil self into the mix early on, someone else would have come along with a different solution, and probably a much better one. "Personal computing" was an inevitability, not a "Bill Gates invention."

    Buy a clue.


  • SCO were the people who sent out a mass mailing some year or so ago telling Linux users how horrible their system was in comparison to SCO, and offering to give a discount for switching.

    They were spreading FUD with the best (and rest) of them. Now it's going to be fun to sit back and watch them have to swallow their pride to stay in business. Not that I believe thee'll truly change gears until a few more big companies turn to Linux, but it's coming...

    Who wants to bet that they'll do something like Open Source some of their inner utility packages for Unixware soon?

    Ha Ha SCO. Ha Ha.
  • Although RH, not the largest Linux vendor BTW, market capitalization is higher than SCO's the latter ones revenues are higher than RH's.


    RHAT's valuation is based on mindshare and installed base, not revenue, and they are definitely winning there. SCO may have more revenue, and for that matter so may SuSE, but
    they can't touch the installed base or mindshare.

    Remember how last LinuxWorld suits were going around asking the ticker symbol for Linux? Well, as far as they're concerned RHAT is now the ticker symbol for Linux.
  • An excerpt from this [zdnet.com] article from Feb 1999:

    SCO officials, however, say the open-source threat is not damaging
    their business.

    "We hear this all the time, but truth be told, our unit shipments are up
    and our revenues are up," says a SCO spokesman. "I think that's a sign
    that Unix on Intel is hot and that Linux is not really having effect on our
    ability to grow."

    Nowadays:

    It's an important--if not necessary--move for the long-time Unix purveyor,
    whose revenues are threatened by the spread of Linux.

    Just thought I'd point that out to anyone who's forgotten about SCO's
    badmouthing of Linux only just a few months ago.
  • I support / admin several hundred SCO servers (ouch) and I often have to visit the SCO website for technical articles and online registration of licenses. The other day (about 2 weeks ago) the word 'linux' in their 'news' section caught my eye so I took a quick gander.

    The section contained about 5 or 6 links to articles from various online news sources (ranging from zdnet to msnbc) about Linux's downfalls. They even had a link to an article about IT personnel who had lost their jobs for installing Linux servers! They looked *really* scared.

    I was going to email the link to the SCO 'news' site to Slashdot but eventually blew it off thinking it wasn't news worthy but the links are gone now. It would have been nice to have documented this on slashdot before they changed their attitude on linux.
    --

    A mind is a terrible thing to taste.

  • Commodore had "personal computers" for a long time too, but since their marketing skill was on par with Microsoft's programming skill, they never managed to penetrate the business market. Still, I grew up with Vic20 -> C128 -> A500 -> A4000, and only bought a "PC" after finding a non-MS operating system for it (slackware linux).

    Microsoft's only innovations were in the areas of marketing and licensing. The world didn't need them.
  • I find this ironic for an entirely different reason; a message sent by SCO to a RHL
    mailing list about two years ago, suggesting that Linux users would be better off
    replacing their `old Linux OS' with (some version of) SCO -- at the price of ~$1500 :>

    sb

  • SCO is actually on much firmer ground than Redhat. They've been in existance for many many years, and have carved out a niche for themselves. Hell, they even generated a profit last quarter!

    Financially, yes, SCO is solid as a rock. But good finances alone do not make a good company (unless you are a bank).

    SCO got to their position by being just about the only company that sold (relatively) low-cost Unix. But now, their prices are way out of line with what's freely available. And now that database apps like Oracle are coming to Linux, there's not much reason to be sticking with SCO.

    I never used Unixware, and some people say it's pretty good. But no one's writing applications for it anymore. Heck, when's the last time you saw it as a target in a Makefile?

    However, I have used Openserver 5, and I thought it stunk. I'm glad to be done with it.

    So I'd be worried if I was SCO. They're like that guy falling out of a 100 story building: you ask him how he's doing as he passes the 50th floor and he says "So far, everything's OK."

  • Inevetiably (such as when their stock price falls from it's current position of trading at several THOUSAND times it's earnings), they'll need to have access to more capital... In order to do so, they'll release more shares to the public. Eventually, less than 50% will be held by those within the company.

    Welcome to the world of publicly traded companies. Yes, you have the potential of becoming a billionaire overnight, but you also become accountable to a whole lot of other people. Shareholders can get angry. The government (SEC) can get angry. You need to appease all of these people.

    Therefore, the possiblitiy exists that Redhat's (and other's) hands' may be forced to the point that they do what the shareholders want, which may or may not be in the best interest of the open source community.

    It won't happen today, tomorrow, or even next week. But be on the lookout. You're playing with powers who are possess much more clout than Redhat, Microsoft, or any other organization or movement in the US... One shareholder suit can eject the board, displace the CEO, and redirect the direction of the company. Likely? No. Possible? YES!
  • Unless you're amazon, ebay or yahoo (the latter two actually managed to MAKE money) finances have a whole lot to do with the health of the company! And even now, week after week, I read articles about how so and so is fed up and wants Amazon to at least turn a profit one of these quarters...

    Yes, SCO was the most popular version of Unix available for Intel for quite a long time, and yes, Linux has stolen some of it's thunder, but the high-end of Linux is only eating into the low to mid range of SCO... 64 processors on Linux??? Yes, It'll probably see them. It may even use them. But it won't perform to it's fullest potential with them. SCO can buy a few 64 CPU machines for their programmers. The myth about Linux is that its developed by programmers in their off time. How many of these programmers have 64 CPU machines in their study (or basement)...

    In that basis, it's easy to understand the developemtn of Beowolf, in that instead fo requiring one huge expenditure on equipment, you can instead incrementally scale it. Beowolf can probably scale much further than SCO is able to, but it's still an esoteric technology.

    And yes, i've rarely seen a makefile with options for compiling to SCO. To me, that simply means that it's still primarily targeted by developers who don't wish to devulge their source code.

    Oracles on Linux (actually, i just received my 8i cd today! :)... Which is great for developers, but I'm sure we'll find that we'll quickly rush into Linux's boundries and have to upgrade to SCO, Solaris, AIX, etc...

    From everything I've that I've read, Unixware had superior performance and features over Opensierver. Therefore SCO chose to phase OpenServer out and merge it's best techonologies with Unixware to create Unixware 7.

    Several companies have done the death plunge that you describe. Most have died, I admit. But the ones that survive have reaffirmed themselves and tackled the goals that they set. SCO may need to give up the lowend of x86 Unix, but they WILL keep the highend, at least til not Merced, but McKinnely, which is still a few years out.

    Even when intel's IA-64 processors appear, they're bound to be prohibitively expensive, until volume ranks up. It won't be until then that as many open source developers gain access to Merced, etc, that Linux can really have a chance to flourish. Counter that with SCO who has the money to buy development machines and the willingness to sign NDA's for early access.

    In my opinion, SCO needn't worry now. 5 years from now, if they haven't done much beyond work at the extreme high end, then they'll be dead. But they've got time to adapt to the new challenge set before them.
  • As I recall SCO needed to be rebooted every 30 days to prevent counter overflow. SCO rock solid? Crash frequencies were better than MS Windows, but they paled in comparision to Linux's track record.

    Maybe UnixWare is better, but as I recall SCO Unix was nothing special.
  • The Open License Software Supplement (aka Skunkware) provides a complete collection of Open Source and freeware products for SCO OpenServer and UnixWare 7, including the KDE desktop, Apache and Squid web servers, EGCS and GNU development tools, Perl and Python, lxrun, cdrecord, and much more.

    First expected reaction from SCO customers: I don't want no stinkin' product on the server

    Very very wise move SCO... next thing you know, people will actually start using Linux. Now,,, we wouldn't want this, would we?

    ---

  • They seemed to be able to raise capital quite well before IPO. All those cash infusions. As their's only expenses are salaries, do not quite see why would they need to issue more stock - big corporate investors prefer small outstanding share, and would be happy to pay needed expenses with cash infusion, instead of watching their share shrinking...
  • If you'll remember, Microsoft invented the PC. Whenever I make this statement of fact, people invariably mention Apple. What Apple had was a game machine. Really, I guess that explains all those Visicalc sales. It wasn't until Microsoft came along and wrote the missing software for an IBM that computers became truly useful to regular people who wanted to get work done.
    And why did IBM make that computer...Apple...
    plus, the killer app for the PC was Lotus 123.
    In fact today there are many other, and better, choices of operating systems. This is a direct result of Microsoft popularizing the computer.
    Close on this one...I think the best explaination of what MS did was in a Unix Review article about six years ago: They added sex to computers... before MS-DOS computer OS's primarily came from the manufactures (even with Unix, you got your maker's version). With MS the OS and apps became seperate from the computer. Result, commodity hardware. If Billy Boy hadn't kept the rights to market MS-DOS and given to IBM we'd still be in the manufacture of hardware = maker of OS world. When they continued MS-DOS after IBM tried to push OS/2, it makes sense.
    Actually, you can understand why OS/2 failed against Windows 3.1 with this. I'm Compaq/Dell/Swan/Gateway/whoever. I can pay MS $100 for DOS/Windows or I can pay IBM $60 for OS/2. If I pay MS, they make new apps that help sell my computers. If I pay IBM they can knock those $60 off the price of their OS/2 computers and undercut me.
    I see Linux and the *BSD systems now doing the same to OS. It'll take a few years and a MS mistake (clones really began to overtake IBM after the PS2 line).
    So anything related to computers is a Microsoft spinoff. I rest my case. Uhmm, I think you mean PC's at best. Even then, that's a big statement. I think the best you can argue is MS was integral to commodizing hardware.
    Herb

  • Interesting idea. I used to run a verion of SVR4.2 that originated with the old UNIX Laboratories (or whatever it was called before being sold to Novell and, later, SCO). It had a journaled file system (vxfs?). If that was part of the deal when SCO got hold of Unixware, that'd be a great addition to the Open Source code collection... provided that there aren't other licensing issues covering the filesystem.

  • Ah, yes, the arrogance of SCO.

    It's hardly a novelty.

    Around two years ago, I was at a convention in Oslo, where both SUN and SCO were two prominent (for different values of prominent) Unix suppliers.

    Just out of curiosity, I asked them what they thought about Linux (and I also asked SUN if they would support it soon).

    SUN was pretty condescending, considering it a "toy" OS.

    SCO was even worse, and started on that line about being the best-selling OS (uhm, Unix) on the Intel platform, and that Linux couldn't count, since Linux didn't sell.

    It didn't matter to SCO that their market share (in terms of licenses sold) was lower than the estimated number of Linux users at that time.

    In some ways, I understand them, but in other ways, what the heck were they thinking?
  • since this is likely one of the first posts on this subject, might as well do what everyone else does. They don't actually say first post anymore, they just say something blatantly obvious and often factually wrong... so:

    I think that it is great that Linux gets more and more support.
  • I had the opportunity to speak with a SCO recruiter (got an uber-kewl "I (heart) UNIX" bumper sticker too..heh) on campus a couple months ago during a job fair.. Not to say anything bad about SCO, but, the recruiter seemed to give me the impression that they were fairly frightened about Linux's impact on their marketshare. It seemed like they were almost distancing themselves from their own product in order to prepare to embrace Linux if need-be. Looks like theyre making steps in that direction. A good thing, imho. Kudos to SCO!

    Bowie
    PROPAGANDA [system12.com]
    Bowie J. Poag
  • ...Considering that every other Major Unix vendor has anounced something involving linux. Be it opening the source to some module or anouncing that they "support" Linux.

    SCO changed their tune pretty quick. I was thinking that when they're on the virge of going under, thats when they would do something like this.

    anyways, welcome aboard SCO.

  • Of course they would be frightened about Linux's impact on their marketshare. SCO has the most to lose of any Unix vendor because of Linux. Unix on intel machines is SCO's main business. Unless you have some software or hardware that can't be moved over to Linux, I don't see much of an advantage to paying SCO license fees when you can have an equivalent Linux or BSD system for free. When retail chains get their stuff ported to linux/BSD and begin to replace SCO deployments, SCO is going to really going to feel the heat.

  • Wasn't SCO a Microsoft spinoff?

    If that is the case (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if not!), what is the relationship between the two now?

    If SCO starts doing Linux support, it'd be an interesting irony, eh? It'd be funny if SCO should be called in when MS suddenly needs more Linux support than it can generate internally ...

    timothy

    p.s. I don't hate Microsoft; I just like Free / free software better for both the reasons given by RMS and the ones given by ESR.

  • Re:Here's the truth... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    On MP machines Unixware is faster than Linux and their compiler is better than gcc-2.9x too. $$$'s might sound impressive for Joe Sixpack but for companies other things are far more important at times. In that respect, long life everything that comes with vi.
  • So, if RedHat's market capitalization is ~5.7 billion and SCO's is only $270 million, then is it not feasible that at some point in time it might be possible for RedHat (or some other Linux company, maybe a few) to buy SCO?
    They could even open source UNIX (maybe), but could definately improve on several (some?) aspects of Linux, right?

    Hmmm...

  • This will be interesting... (Score:3)

    by Ami Ganguli ( 921 ) on Saturday August 14, 1999 @07:02AM (#1746438) Homepage

    SCO is the one company that will definitely be put out of business by Linux if they don't change their business model. It's good that they recognize this while they're still profitable.

    The fact is that Red Hat alone has far greater market capitalization than SCO right now. That means Red Hat by itself has enough investment capital to dwarf anything SCO can put into research and development. Add to that all the other parties that are investing time and money into Linux, and SCO doesn't stand a chance.

    Unfortunatly, SCO only has 40 people in their consulting group (not really surprising, since I've never heard of them before). They're going to have to work really hard to convince people that they're credible at anything other than SCO software.

  • hmm... can you short Redhat stock now?

  • SCO will help customers decide whether Linux is appropriate and which version is best for their circumstances

    How often will a linux distro be "appropriate" and how often will SCO be "appropriate". And at $12,000 to answer this question, why the heck not save the money and put in SCO to begin with? Or, better yet, install your favorite distro on some of your favorite machines in a Beowulf cluster

    -George

  • I find this ironic because SCO was always preceived to be "low end Unix" as opposed to the higher end Suns and HPs and SGIs et al. They had low end, often sigle role, SCO Unix and Xenix boxen out there. They had Open Desktop (aka Open Dogtop). Now they are saying that Linux will be for desktops and low end servers (the new low-end Unix) while they will be the high end? High end SCO? I chuckle in their general direction.

    Still, it's good to see they can recognise a reality shift before they are no longer real (in existence). Let's see if it is timely enough to save them.

    -M

  • Actually, $12,000 is a sh!tpile of money at the company I work for. One of the beauties of Linux is that small companies have a way of getting Unix into the company without bending over for SCO, et al. Our proxy server was built with some hardware leftover from various upgrades, and a Slack CD.

    I see two possibilities for small businesses needing a network OS (sorry, not familiar with NetWare, so they won't appear here):

    First, NT, pointy-clicky. Can be kinda cheap, and it's hard to REALLY screw things up. Learn how to restart your server every night, and the BSOD's diminish.

    Second, Linux. Save money on the OS, put money into the apps (Oracle?) It's harder to use at first than NT, but I've got tons of free support, whether it be on /., the man pages, the HOW-TO's, etc.

    Sorry. Not everyone works for a Fortune 500 company. Some of us are in those companies that really provide new jobs for the economy.

    -George
  • SCO is actually on much firmer ground than Redhat. They've been in existance for many many years, and have carved out a niche for themselves. Hell, they even generated a profit last quarter!

    SCO's PE is 20.2 to 1
    Microsoft is 59.6 to 1
    Redhats is 2131.2:1
    Ebay is 9800.0:1

    Microsoft is and has ben Wall Streets darling. It's gone for how many consequtive quarters making a profit (monopoly not withstanding? :)? ... If it was valued in the same terms as Redhat, it would be worth in the hundreds of trillions of dollars! And, they are on much firmer financil ground than RHAT, thanks to the proprietaryness of their software. I can go buy a Redhat package, dupe the CD, while replacing every instance of Redhat with Lucas' Hat, and presto! competition for Redhat...

    Yes, Redhat's market cap is phenomenal. But really, unless they up and buy SCO this week, its not going to make a tangible difference. Redhat first needs to prove to Wallstreet that they can differeniate themselves from the other players in order to generate a PROFIT (a lost word on Wall Street these days, I admit...) Otherwise, thousands of investors who bought Redhat because they heard Linux in conjunction with the MSFT trial will dump their stock and pummel the stock price.

    I'm not sure that onw would want Redhat to directly attack SCO. Rather they should let Linux itself expand into SCO's territory, and instead concentrate their money into linux development itself. Yet this is still in a sense, a threat to themselves that we'll have to see how it plays out. For every $1 that Redhat spends on R&D, it essentially adds another $1 to Debian's, Caldera's, and every other vendor's R&D as well...

    So, unless Redhat does something rash, it'll be very interesting to see how Wallstreet treats RHAT and every other Linux vendor that comes forward in the coming months with the open-source philosophy. These companies will no longer be able to be so accomidating to the open-source community, unless they are able to justify it to their investors... Which, if they show capable of making a profit and sustaining themselves, will be much easier...

    I guess we need to just sit back and wait for the black ink to appear on their balance sheet.
  • even in sarcastic mode you should not forget that MS did not write DOS, they bought it.

    erik
  • They weren't a spinoff. [They may actually be older then Microsoft] but microsoft did/does? own 10% of the company. Microsoft invests some money many years ago.

  • Microsoft was shipping a modern Visual Basic compiler, and an ELF-based system (plagerizers note - what the f is an elf)

    ELF is the acronym for Extensible Linking Format, the second generation layout of UNIX binary executables.

    The claim that Microsoft was shipping an ELF-based system means that at some point in the past Microsoft was shipping an operating system that could execute UNIX binaries.

    Although Microsoft was, at some point, involved in Xenix, Xenix has been dead long before Visual Basic came into existence.

    Hey, it's quite obvious that you were flapping your gums, and blathering about things you had absolutely no clue about. Perhaps you should write to Phar Lap badmouthing AOL, again. Maybe they'll believe you this time.
    --

  • The following paragraph strikes me a bit funny:

    Professional services--essentially high-priced hand-holding for
    customers who need someone experienced to set up or run
    complex computer systems--are a growing business for computer
    companies. Although Linux can be obtained for free, Linux
    companies are hoping to make money by selling services. SCO is
    a new arrival in this area, though, because it sells Unix but not its
    offspring, Linux.

    Thie isn't a new business for computer companies... In the 20+ years I've been in the industry most serious computer companies have had services as a major line item on their balance sheets. After the brand loyalty issue died with the workstation revolution, this got even more important. Just like when browsers became free, value added was the major reason to go with one company over the other. Services has always been that value added. There are entire companies dedicated to handholding out there and it isn't a new market segment. It's been pointed to as validation that Linux is a force in the industry when we get some recognition like this but I'm really sorry to see SCO go that way. It probably is the one way they can avoid firesaling the company with the lost revenues. Try to keep in mind that this is the AP reporting on a PR document generated by SCO Marketing to help their position/perception in the market. 40 people isn't a lot of commitment to services if you factor in their other claims (1 person per percent of the Unix market?). Those people will be out there answering questions which is good but they're more likely to be generating custom solution consulting revenue to help their bottom line. I think it's really too little too late for yet another player.

  • Unixware does scale better, but SCO bought that from Novell a couple of years ago. OpenServer is their lower-end Unix, and what they wrote themselves. It is what is in most of the low-end unix boxes at a lot of small businesses. It is not bad, but it is not good, either :)

    Unfortunately, I have to support several SCO machines.

  • They also claimed to own 80% of the Unix on Intel market

    That would put UNIX on Intel market at around,
    say, 60 million systems? I mean: if Linux has 12 millions..

    Wow...
  • It's rarely necessary that you have to buy a failing competitor. If you're the reason they're loosing market share, you're already getting the most important asset, the customer/user. It's far more likely a second tier vendor would buy them to consolidate/double their market position to avoid being "on the bubble" of insignificance in the market.

  • 16-node clustering, journaled file system.... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 14, 1999 @07:17PM (#1746454)
    Failover clustering to 16-nodes, a journaled file system, 32-way SMP for starters... This is all good stuff in UnixWare7 - and all recently written, without the (c)AT&T. Red Hat could buy SCO, open source it tomorrow, and Linux would be unanswerable in datacentres. And doesn't SCO own the UNIX (TM)? And so Linux would officially become *the* official Unix? :-)
  • These companies will no longer be able to be so accomidating to the open-source community, unless they are able to justify it to their investors..

    RHAT biggest investors are large corporations who, IMHO, will be perfectly happy if RHAT provides custom-taylorer Linux services for THEM. Think Linux Department of IBM, Oracle or whoever invested in RHAT... RHAT does not need to sell anything to the public to please these investors, and they would not care if it benefits Debian/Corel or Caldera either...
  • Redhat's investors are the Public. Whomever buys a share is an investor. If you're displeased with what the company is doing, think that they're not trying to maximize profit, you can take issue with them. If other people agreed with you and took part, you'd have a class action suit on your hands. Yes, the largest investors to date have been larger corporations, but as more and more stock finds it's way to the public, Redhat will need to be accountable to more and more people.
  • Right. With their few expenses, not to mention small income, they won't need to issue more stock to remain that the level that they're at. If they aspire to grow and take on MSFT, which is what Wall Street seems to expect given their valuation, they'll need to expand beyond the scope of their original investors. They will need to issue more stock to use as bait to attract more developers to their fold. Their stock WILL deflate as people reap the profits of the IPO... At that point it'll be wake up time.

    It's bound to get interesting when Caldera goes public. At that point Redhat will announce their new opensource breakthrough, and a few days later Caldera can turn around and say they've decided to adopt Redhats breakthrough for their own distribution. One day, they're going to have to turn on each other. That'll hurt us (Linux community) all...

    We all linux. But what about all those articles about how Redhat was having the potential to cause or actually causing fragmentation within the Linux community? Now that they're everyone's darling on Wallstreet does it no longer matter? It does, and as soon as people remember those issues they had with them, it will again.
  • SCO is a poor excuse for an operating system. I'd go Solaris anyday - At least it's got the BSD compatibility libs.

    Yes, gcc is included on the extra CD's but good luck making then work.

    Hell, I rather run SCO ELFs on linux via ibcs than linux ELFs on sco.

    There was a windows emulator called merge that worked ok, but vmware blows it away.

  • A class action lawsuit against RedHat who doesn't have any real control over linux by a bunch of stockholders? Be laughed out of the courtroom. You need to do your home work on how the linux world works and the role companies like RedHat have in it. Hint. It's nothing like the roles Microsoft and SCO plays...

  • The point I was trying to make is that SCO had domminance in the low-end Unix business for point-of-sale and other business applications. Most SCO machines run a small database, some custom apps, supporting maybe a dozen users.

    64 processor shared memory machines in the Intel architechture don't exist, AFAIK. But they certainly do from Sun, SGI and IBM (maybe HP too). When I think "high-end", SCO defintely doesn't come to mind. SCO never had that market for Unix, and they never will. Now they are losing the low-end, so in my opinion they are screwed.

    Most of the existing apps out there were written for Openserver. I'm sure the transition to Unixware will require non-trivial porting effort.

    Now is the time for them to dump Openserver, dump Unixware, and help their ISVs to port their applications to Linux (instead of Windows NT).

    SCO may not have that much money in the future either. Their business model assumes that they can sell OSs for $1000+, compilers for extra, and support for way extra. The new business model (like with RedHat) is that the OS is free, and support is reasonably priced. If you read the Innovator's Dilemma, you see why companies can have a hard time switching business models.

  • Let's take a look at that feature list again.

    Failover clustering is wonderful, when it gets released and you can actually get your hands on it. Not the case with Unixware.

    Thirty-two way SMP is nice as well, if your hardware will support it, which x86 currently doesn't.

    So, in reality, at this point you can do *maybe* single node, 8-way SMP.

  • SCO currently offers three operating system lines - Openserver 5.0.x, Unixware 2.1.x, and Unixware 7.x. They did not write any of them in their entirety.

    Openserver 5 is based on the SVR3.2 kernel. They haven't done any real modifications except for new hardware support and bugfixes for nearly a decade. Not to mention that portions of OSR5 are purchased from outside companies, e.g. Panorama, their X desktop.

    This product has no real advantages over Linux except for a large legacy application base. Sales are currently impressive due to an upgrade rush prompted by the Year 2000.

    SCO is planning on dropping this product after one or two more revisions. Unfortunately for them, it is also their current cash cow and it will hurt their gross profits immensely when they do.

    Unixware 2 is based on the SVR4MP kernel. No real modifications to this product since its purchase from Novell.

    Another product that really only has a market for legacy applications. Sales are typically upgrades or for itsy bitsy teeny weeny niche markets. To be honest, I have no idea why this product is still being sold.

    Unixware 7 is based on what SCO is calling SVR5, since they now own the AT&T codebase. It adds some "enterprise" features that are lacking in the Unixware 2 product line and merges in admin tools from Openserver 5.

    This is where SCO would have everyone go in the future. Sales have been tepid, but are starting to pick up some.

    Personally, though it has potential, I still wouldn't touch it. As it is a brand new product line it still is buggy as hell, the interface is a nightmarish cross between Unixware 2 and Openserver 5, they currently don't have their own support personel trained on it and its pricing structure makes it as expensive (if not more) as the traditional high end *nixes.
  • > Actually, SCO owns the copyright to the word
    > "UNIX".

    BZZZZZZZZt. Thanks for playing. The correct answer is the Open Group. We have some lovely parting gifts for you though. :)

    SCO briefly held the trademark, but transfered it to the Open Group a long while back.

  • Re:The closest thing yet to MS support? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I believe that MS has yet 10% shares in SCO, but they sold them their right to enter the Unix market a while ago
  • If you can borrow it and you put up 100% of the cash value. IE no margin on the short. BUT how small is the float? Be carefull with companies with a small number of shares outstanding.
  • I think its cool, they need to get a real OS anyway ;P

    But what if RedHat bought SCO... then started putting features from SCO into RedHat... all the sudden AT&T Code shows up... OH NO!!! Its the BSD Lawsuit all over again!!

  • There was a time, long ago, when SCO was thought to be way ahead of the pack, as far as PC-UNIX was concerned. While AT&T was shipping hopelessly outdated dreck -- K&R C compiler, a.out only kernel -- for x86 platforms, SCO was shipping a modern ANSI compiler, and an ELF-based system. Every hardware manufacturer, and his mother, was shipping device drivers for their hardware under SCO UNIX. A lot were also shipping AT&T UNIX drivers, but not all of them.

    How times have changed... Instead of SCO leading the pack, they're barely trying to keep up. They are reduced to an embarassing "follow the leader" position. Goes to show you that you can't rest on your laurels, and always assume that you'll remain a king forever.
    --

  • Never Trust UNIX People (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Don't trust these UNIX people. They are all demons. They kill their parents and fork children. I don't know how they could do this with their balls cut off but they manage. Be afraid. They are taking over the world.

  • Re:Cool. (Score:1)

    by fwr ( 69372 )
    But what if RedHat bought SCO... then started putting features from SCO into RedHat... all the sudden AT&T Code shows up... OH NO!!! Its the BSD Lawsuit
    all over again!!

    I don't think the GPL would allow that.

    They could provide separate programs that were BSD licensed, but I don't think you can combine the actual source code from a GPL project and a BSD project and still have it GPL. That being the case, as long as they kept any BSD derived code completely separate then they could always pull that code at a later date without effecting the operation of the system.

  • Everything computer is a Microsoft spinoff (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you'll remember, Microsoft invented the PC. Whenever I make this statement of fact, people invariably mention Apple. What Apple had was a game machine. It wasn't until Microsoft came along and wrote the missing software for an IBM that computers became truly useful to regular people who wanted to get work done. In fact today there are many other, and better, choices of operating systems. This is a direct result of Microsoft popularizing the computer. So anything related to computers is a Microsoft spinoff. I rest my case. I know I'll get moderated because I refuse to flame Microsoft. Now I don't like Microsoft anymore than the next guy on Slashdot but this doesn't blind me to the facts.
  • If you ever boot or log into a SCO server, you will see a list of copyright credits about two screens long.

    I don't think anybody would have an easy time making it Open Source because you'd have to get permission from all the copyright holders.
  • I kind of like the idea of SCO becoming a West Coast campus of RedHat. Timezones would allow better coverage for phone support (for corporate accounts)and RHAT would have good access to Silicon Valley talent. SCO's still large installed base of servers would have a compelling upgrade path to Linux, keeping the SCO customer base. As SCO customers gleefully (and with some relief) installed Linux, Linux marketshare would climb even faster than it already is. Sooner than anyone had anticipated, Windows would marginalized as a server OS in the small business arena, and Microsoft's Redmond campus would start to resemble the Fuehrerbunker in Berlin toward the end of the war.."more bad news, o fearless leader"
  • Linux isn't really UNIX (has not been certified by The Open Group, whoever they are -- I *think* they hold the UNIX copyright).

    Free/Net/OpenBSD aren't UNIX either (no original AT&T code in them, + they haven't been certified by The Open Group either to the best of my knowledge).

    So while they can say they have 80% of *UNIX on Intel*, they don't have 80% of the "UNIX or UNIX clone on Intel" market :).

  • SCO hurting? Naw it can't be.. (Score:3)

    by eponymous cohort ( 8637 ) on Saturday August 14, 1999 @08:30AM (#1746477)
    I thought I read an article just yesterday where SCO claimed to hold 41% of the Unix market because the are the *cough* *cough* "leader in stability and scalability" *cough* *cough*. They also claimed to own 80% of the Unix on Intel market.

  • Strange idea. My(well. my dad's..) first PC had CP/M on it.. Have not heard of MS-DOS then...

  • I think the article writer meant that SCO is new to the Linux services market, not the services market in general.

    At any rate, the article is good for a laugh or two. SCO will still be recommending it's Unix for "high-end" applications. I'm sorry, but if I'm worried about scalibility, I'll run Solaris AIX, HP-UX or Irix, definitely not SCO Unix. The Intel hardware out there that SCO can run on just can't scale like Solaris on a 64 processor Starfire. No one makes those kind of boxes yet, but it looks like SGI is going to. :-)

    James

  • He's talking about selecting hardware configs. One of the problems with all Intel Unixen has always been that isoteric hardware mostly doesn't get supported, so you find a couple of "working sets", which you sell to your clients as part of a "shrink-wrapped" solution (hardware+OS+apps).
    Plenty of consultants have been making money off SCO from the last 20 years this way, and you'll see plenty of shops where a 486+Xenix/SCO Unix is still running the show. SCO's old-school unixen are rock solid (interesting to see what comes out with UnixWare 7.x). I've had customers come in only because their disks crashed or too many ports on their multi-port card have become clogged up with dust, after 7-8 years of the machine running without coming down for maintenance.

    And about your remark,

    >>I mean, you could make windows stable if you put the right hardware and software together and froze the configuration.

    it takes an active admin to keep _any_ NT box up and running for longer than a couple of weeks (or at least it's so with all the installations I've seen). Not so with most Unix configurations.

  • Even NT has got some good ideas built in.

    No kidding. I (and one other person in the office) didn't know squat about administering a network before we had to deal with NT. Luckily, the pointy clicky thing got us away from our vendor (a horror story to long to go into here) and into controlling ourselves. And the constant rebooting (I just changed the damned IP address!) got me to look at Linux.

  • > Anybody else have any astroturf that needs to be mown?

    When you get done here, please drop by comp.os.linux.advocacy and give 'em a mow job. I think that's where they send astroturfers for basic training.

  • Microsoft wrote CPM/86? They sure didn't write DOS. Seattle something or other did. CPM/86 died because it was too expensive. Microsoft was cheap. People are cheap.

  • Microsoft's good old days. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There was a time, long ago, when Microsoft was thought to be way ahead of the pack, as far as Desktop-OS's were concerned. While Linus was shipping hopelessly outdated dreck -- GNU C compiler, a.out only kernel -- for x86 platforms, Microsoft was shipping a modern Visual Basic compiler, and an ELF-based system (plagerizers note - what the f is an elf). Every hardware manufacturer, and his mother, was shipping device drivers for their hardware under Microsoft Windows. A lot were also shipping SCO UNIX drivers, but not all of them. How times have changed... Instead of Microsoft leading the pack, they're barely trying to keep up. They are reduced to an embarassing "follow The Penguin" position. Goes to show you that you can't rest on your laurels(plagerizers note - what the f are laurels?), and always assume that you'll remain a king forever.
  • If you'll remember, Microsoft invented the PC.

    Funny, the way I remember it is that IBM "invented" the PC...

  • I've used both Red Hat and a couple of SCO flavors. I have yet to find a SCO feature Red Hat would want.

  • SCO will GPL the AT&T code (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SCO owns the code. They can put it under the GPL,
    the NPL, the BSD license, the LGPL, or any other
    license they damn well like.

    SCO is giving us SAR code already, under the GPL.
    This is real AT&T UNIX code.

Slashdot Top Deals

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann

Close