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SCO Change Their Name to Tarantella

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the you-gotta-be-kidding dept.

GoodPint sent in a story so bizarre that you'll swear I made it up because nothing interesting is happening 'cuz its august and everyone is on vacation... Whats left of SCO is now renaming itself. The best name they could come up with was Tarantella... conjuring up warm fuzzy images for countless investors, as well as limitless mock fodder for folks like me. Reminds of an old Onion story... "New Corporate Logo Changes Everything".

12 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Well, Name Change... by suwalski · · Score: 4

    It's amazing what a name change can do. A new corporate image can completely change the meaning of the company, and it can motivate the employees. I'm not saying that this is necessarily happening in this casse, but a name change and even a new logo is healthy every now and then.

  2. Meaning of Tarantella by scrutty · · Score: 3
    Its an Italian folk dance As featured in this reasonably well known poem

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  3. The rename game. by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5

    Renaming always helps. Look what "Itanium" did for "Merced" and "W2K" did for "NT 5".

    I'm thinking about renaming my "Chevy" to "Jaguar", my scratch-built PC to "HAL 9001", and myself to "Bond, James Bond".

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    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  4. They've got a new product by Iron_Slinger · · Score: 4

    SCO, err Tarantella has a new product called, surprisingly enough, tarantella. It's basically a web app that allows different platforms to run applications through it.

    There is a demo here

    It's pretty cool, but it's dirt slow.

    They've got it set up so you can run Word or Powerpoint, a few unix apps, etc. all on your web browser.

    IS

    1. Re:They've got a new product by sporri · · Score: 3

      It's more that just a web app. It reminds more of metaframe than anything else. (why use that when you can have X/VNC :) It is really quite impressive and is used for instance on freedesk.com running applix (if you have not tried applix out then there is your change) it is tecnically impressive but not as fast as citrix and yes seems to crash. But it is an impressive product non the less. Read the docs at sco's website.

  5. Why is this so surprising? by mattdm · · Score: 3
    After selling the OS part of the company, their Tarantella product is pretty much all they have left. I believe that it even said in some of the stories relating to the sale that SCO wanted to refocus themselves around this product. So, this name change is pretty much completely expected.

    It's a shame that all the cool names keep disappearing. I'm glad 3Com has let U.S. Robotics live on as a product line name at least.

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  6. Why Free SCO Sucks by Grendel+Drago · · Score: 5
    Free SCO stuff sucked because they didn't want to release it. Their low-end server share was getting eaten alive by Linux (though it had been on its way out for quite a while) and so they thought they could jump on the bandwagon and keep making their money.

    Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Since they didn't offer anything (well, certainly nothing worth the price) that Linux didn't, they couldn't compete.

    SGI, on the other hand, has the right idea. By giving up IRIX and supporting Linux development, they're

    • freeing up mucho resources to work on hardware, their primary source of revenue (which usually came with the software) and
    • making an already good operating system even better, by working on the XFS port, XFree86 development, and numerous smaller projects (like the testing suite)

    SGI makes out well, and Linux makes out well. This is how free software can help companies, not a half-hearted attempt at releasing stuff that the company doesn't even want.

    -grendel drago

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    Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
  7. Uh, this is nothing new... by erat · · Score: 4

    For those who are not aware of the software SCO actually sells (and until the merger is approved, the software that they still sell), OpenServer and Unixware are only two of their offerings. They have been offering a virtual network server/client system called Tarantella for some time now. It mimics Citrix's VNC client for Windows, but Tarantella is run through any web browser (maybe Citrix's offering is as well; I haven't tried either, personally).

    SCO is selling off their server and service divisions, but they're keeping their Tarantella division. It's only logical that they rename their company after the only product they're going to be selling. Everything that made SCO known other than this new product is being sold, so in essence what is SCO if it only sells Tarantella?

    It's an odd name, yes, but the name change is logical IMNSHO.

  8. The Future of Web Apps by 11223 · · Score: 3
    Welcome to the future friends, where it's not how fast your computer is, but how fast your bandwidth is! I've got an OC3, how much do you have? Nevermind that it would be a heck of a lot cheaper to just by a goddamn computer than to rent this OC3-connected IA, but I've got the bandwidth. And with GLX, I can even play 3D games over the network as fast as my friend's P60 with an S3 Virge!

    The long and short of it is that this is SCO's plan to destroy desktop computing - the desktop computing that kicked SCO's ass in the marketplace, and this is their revenge - by forcing us to rent OC3's to get our applications. With the help of Microsoft (.NET is just another name for the Tarentella idea), they will destroy the PC revolution out of fear of the Linux revolution. We must stop them!

  9. Why not "Tarantino"? by Apuleius · · Score: 3

    Their stuff (Like most software) gets written "from dusk till dawn" anyway.

  10. The name is crap because ... by Decado · · Score: 3

    They probably had lots of cool names but tarantella was the only name for which they could still get a domain.

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  11. [ot]Re:City of Taranto by AbbyNormal · · Score: 3

    No, you are half right. It has to do with Taranto...but it has to do with Tarantullas:

    And I quoteth:
    "The St. Vitus' dance became a real public menace, seizing hundreds of people, spreading from city to city, mainly in the Low Countries, in Germany, and in Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries. It was a kind of mass hysteria, a wild leaping dance in which the people screamed and foamed with fury, with the appearance of persons possessed. In these convulsive, frantic, and jerky dances, religious, medical, and social influences probably interacted in response to such things as the epilepsy-like seizures of persons suffering from the Black Death. Italy was afflicted with tarantism, an epidemic presumably caused by the bite of venomous spiders. Its effects had to be counteracted by distributing the poison over the whole body and "sweating it out," which was accomplished by dancing to a special kind of music, the tarantella."

    Source: Britannica.com

    Thank you...come again.


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