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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.
While I'm not particularly concerned about Caldera's well-being as a company these days, I get the feeling sometimes a lot of Linux users don't have a clue about Caldera's history.
This is not a fly-by-night operation that never did anything for Linux, guys. They were the first company that made a serious attempt to produce a "professional" Linux distribution. When their first release came out, Caldera Network Desktop 1.0, it attracted a lot of enthusiastic attention. And they contributed code back to Linux in the 1.x kernel days. (Not surprisingly, they made Linux play well with NetWare.) When it comes right down to it, the grand drive to make Linux a desktop OS for "non-geek" users started with Caldera.
If Caldera's no longer a particularly geeky company--and they certainly don't seem to be--that's a casualty arising from the combination of making their primary goal usability for enterprise-scale business users and being a public company. (Red Hat so far has placed using entirely non-proprietary solutions at a higher level than making enterprise customers happy, and has moved toward a business model that supports small-business and individual users.)
Even so, Caldera still has the potential to be an important company in the Unix/Linux and open source world, depending on what they do to integrate the UnixWare technology. A cynic would say their track record suggests they'll blow that potential, but that might not be the case. Look at what the article said about UnixWare-based POS systems that might switch to Linux--who would they be expecting to lead them in that switch?
This "Who cares about the CEOs" attitude is mystifying to me, and I'm a card-carrying, Nader-voting bleeding heart. If you are playing in a field with big businesses--and operating systems are definitely such a field--you'd better be able to play like a business.
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].
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Novell, WordPerfect, and Caldera were, or are, all headquartered there. Does that area just have some attraction for doomed companies? Or is it that a move to that area dooms the company?
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Let's drop the stupidity of the old PC client/server model. Although that model is much more sane with Unix, it still isn't very scalable or low-maintence.
A thin client, or hybrid thin-client approach is the answer in most corporate environments. We all saw what a city in FL is doing in terms of Linux on the desktop - served apps, much lighter weight clients. This is cost-effective and reliable.
For the home user, yes, Linux on the desktop is a great idea. But it can't be a replacement for Windows on the home desktop - that's throwing hard work at a bad idea. Instead, the focus should be on hiding the user from the complexities of application installation, etc. Windows fails at that. My dad has no idea how to install applications, or why he would want to. We can't be successful if Linux on the desktop is as hard as Windows on the desktop.
Of course, for tech-heads, Linux on the desktop is still viable. But we're not most people.
"But you sell a desktop version of Linux?
We believe we can save 20 to 30 percent with Linux on the desktop, but there's a difference between running Microsoft on the desktop and how we see customers running Linux. We people running Linux desktops managed by Volution, or running Windows on the desktop and accessing Linux through Tarantella.
But as the Internet becomes a more pervasive business model, Linux will become a thin client, or a customised client. We are moving away from monolithic clients to a desktop operating system that will be more customised to fit the business need.
The challenge of the desktop is evolving. The traditional monolithic desktop is not for Linux but the evolving thin client desktop is ideal for it. Something like 80 to 90 percent of personal time is now spent in the browser, and as the Internet becomes predominant use of desktop, applications will follow. As the desktop becomes the browser, you will see Linux become the predominant platform on devices that connect to the Internet. "
Users don't like thin clients, and first person
who says users like what you tell them to like
has never had a user.
It's nice to see that scodera is banging there
collective head agains't the same wall half the
industy is...and they are still convinced that the door that was sealed over when terminals
went away is there...and gonna open any day
now...
Guttermouth is a really good band.
Is it just me, or does the way Love (and others) calls a graphics terminal a "Thin Client" make you nauseous? First, the terminal doesn't have any real intelligence, so how can you call it a client? Second, do we really want to move back to the old time-sharing model, where you can't do anything without the approval of computer center (an ancient term we'll probably have to ressurect)? There's a reason we used to call them "The High Priests of a Low Cult."
Caldera was my first distro (-;
then I moved to the then spanking redhat 4.2
then back again to caldera
they have had some really good engineers and they seem to have got the update thing much better worked out than redhat
they produced this nice app that I could install that updated things without haveing access to the web right then and there as was directory based and had a nice frount end god I am going to PAY for that ! (as in $$$ rather than pain in redhats solution)
that and the potental to really make things work with the UDI project (hosted on sourceforge)
UDI allows drivers for Solaris SCO and linux to work from one base
oh for that to work !
imagine to support unix and likes all you have to code is one driver how many vendors would do that ?
LOTS I can tell you
the project fails in that it should go after USB and IEEE1394 and not network devices and such imagine just one driver for Apple, Solaris, SCO and linux THAT would be cool just get more than my keyboard to work in USB in SOLARIS would be nice
a world where USB floppy zip Rio camras video HD webcams +the rest JUST WORK with one driver
dreams
john jones
Or is Caldera becoming about as irrelevant as a company can get? The thrust of their Linux strategy now seems to be, "Um yeah, it'll run great in our terminal software for Windows users." Also there is this gem:
"As the desktop becomes the browser, you will see Linux become the predominant platform on devices that connect to the Internet."
/em-foghorn That boy, I say, that boy needs to stay outta the sun for a while!
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999