Doug Michels & Ransom Love speak pre-Caldera Forum

A reader writes "Now that SCO Forum has been rebadged as Caldera Forum, I decided to duck out of it this year. But according to this interview, Ransom Love doesn't want to make too many changes. The same cannot be said for Linux and Unix though, where it looks like he's pretty much given up on Linux on the desktop except as a thin client with Tarantella. Coincidentally, there's an accompanying interview with Doug Michels, where he talks about life post-Unix. Seems like the two companies are pretty tight. " Update: 08/17 6:29 PM by M : Jason Perlow wrote in with his review of OpenUNIX 8.

Comments

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

*BSD is dying

Yet nother crippling bombshell hit the eleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that*BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on top of of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick nd its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

*BSD is dying

This guy is a troll. And a bore.

[cculianu]

Who cares? He's the CEO of Caldera.. BIG DEAL! Am I supposed to be impressed? He, like all management types, is obviously a business troll. He has done nothing to add to the general knowledge or to contribute to OSS personally using his intellect.

Give me interviews with greats like Ritchie, Thompson, Torvalds, Stallman, Wall, etc.. and I will listen to what they have to say! Who cares what some CEO thinks about Linux? Even if he is a CEO of a company that works with Linux, he is still a CEO!

NEWS FLASH: Slashdot is supposed to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Interviews with the faceless CEO of Caldera is neither "News for Nerds", nor does it matter.

I am sure 99.9% of us here on slashdot will agree with that assesment.

Anything this CEO in a monkey suit has to say either puts me to sleep or is as profound as "P implies P".

Ransome should be kicked out by the shareholders

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I've worked for Caldera years ago : these guys are going to be trading pink slips very soon, and Ransome deserves most the blame for it (the rest of the blame go to dipsticks Benoit and Pomeroy and some others): they were the biggest Linux vendor when RH was only a small software shop, and they could own the Linux desktop and server space instead of them by now : instead they let RH shaft them over RPM. Of there is also meltdown of Caldera's QA/test department, the SCO buyout and of course, Ransome's approving of Microsoft FUD and Ransome's latest blooper on per-seat Linux licenses.

Love never understood the OpenSource movement or the GPL, and probably never understood how to run a company either. It's amazing Caldera has been around for so long with the CEO consistently doing the Wrong Thing [tm].