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Ransom Love on United Linux, SCO Unix

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the a-falling-hammer-squashes-all-bugs dept.

tit4tat writes: "Caldera chief executive Ransom Love confessed to ZDNet UK that "[Caldera is] not moving Open Unix [i.e., the former SCO Unix] onto Intel's 64-bit platform...." I suspected that Caldera bought SCO just to kill SCO Unix, even though they denied it at the time. Now, the first Unix I ever knew is about to be no more. "

11 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. good riddance by Roadmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    At long last, and hopefully every single one of my sco-using customers will finally see a reason to migrate from that.

    SCO has got to be the single ugliest, un-friendliest, most incomplete and failure-prone unix i've ever used. I was called in to solve problems even the dedicated admins couldn't, and they always turned out to be windows-like, unexplainable glitches that took lots of kludging around to fix.

  2. Why I will never use United Linux... by bogie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ransom Love

    " The only difference is that the UnitedLinux binaries will not freely distributed. People will be able to download the source code and compile their own binaries, but they will not be able to use the UnitedLinux brand"

    Please people now is the time to rally behind the truely free distros out there. If your going to use linux use Redhat,Debian,Gentoo,Slackware,Mandrake, or any of the other fine binary/iso friendly distros out there.

    While I applaud standards I don't think this is the way to go about it.

    --
    If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
    1. Re:Why I will never use United Linux... by erat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Excuse me, but what exactly is your beef?

      All you're restricted from using is the brand. This is a problem? I guess you also can't sleep at night because Linux can't use the UNIX trademark?

      Who cares?? Compile the sources and say they're "UnitedLinux compatible". As long as you don't say "compliant" (which implies passing the certification tests) everything should be peachy.

      You're reading drama into a situation that has none. Promote your favorite distros as much as you want, but don't do so at the unnecessary expense of others, especially when those others are putting forth an honest effort to help Linux.

    2. Re:Why I will never use United Linux... by Jason+Earl · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly right. This is nothing more than yet another wacky hare-brained Caldera scheme to get people to pay more for Free Software without having to actually do more. United Linux is nothing more than a binary version of the LSB plus some additional, fairly basic, packages. Each of the distributions that is participating will have these packages installed and available. Clearly this is not a revolutionary idea. Caldera, and their new compadres are trying to set this package up to be the "new standard" because they know that otherwise folks will continue to use RedHat as the de-facto standard.

      However, Caldera continues to overlook the reason that RedHat became the de-facto standard. That reason is simple. They wrote cool software and gave it away. Because of RedHat's policy of writing GPLed software, their software became the standard and their technology has been adopted by pretty much every other distribution (in one form or another). By and large Linux users, and Linux customers in general, aren't interested in being locked into a single distribution. Nor are they interested in paying per seat licensing fees. Apparently they also aren't interested in purchasing support from companies that sell distributions that rely on such tactics.

      You would think that years of being beaten over the head with a clue stick by the folks at RedHat would have knocked some sense into Mr. Love, but apparently some folks are just amazingly slow learners.

    3. Re:Why I will never use United Linux... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
      " The only difference is that the UnitedLinux binaries will not freely distributed. People will be able to download the source code and compile their own binaries, but they will not be able to use the UnitedLinux brand"

      Please people now is the time to rally behind the truely free distros out there. If your going to use linux use Redhat,Debian,Gentoo,Slackware,Mandrake, or any of the other fine binary/iso friendly distros out there.

      One very good reason to do this is the GPL. If you distribute the binaries, you MUST make source available. If you distribute binaries ONLY with source, or not at all, you have no further obligation to make source available.

      It seems to me that these folks could distribute their product as a binary plus source set, and not make any downloads available at all. They'd save a lot on bandwidth that way. The fact that they aren't speaks well for their good intent. If you want them to do the compile for you, doesn't it seem decent to pay them for it?

    4. Re:Why I will never use United Linux... by Znork · · Score: 3, Insightful

      My guess: because there are dozens of other distributions that do distribute ISO images for free.

      I wont be using (or even trying) united linux either. I'll stick with Redhat and Debian for home use and Redhat for corporate use. The price of buing another Linux distribution is small, but with corporate purchasing involved, the difference between Redhat and, for example, SuSE isnt a few bucks, it's several hundred dollars worth of paperwork time and several weeks to go through processing. Unless I pay for it myself.

      So, give me a complete ISO download to speed up implementation projects and I can dump the support contract through purchasing, without the red tape that comes automatically with an incoming pricetag to a large corporation.

      It's not a question of price. It's completely a question of convenience, and if it isnt convenient it's not what's going to get installed.

    5. Re:Why I will never use United Linux... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      As someone who's worked for a Fortune 10 ("enterprise") company, let me assure you of one thing:

      Management never consults their IT techies.

  3. Re:Caldera's Not Killing Off SCO! by outlander78 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Indeed. There is no way a start-up could afford to buy an established competitor just to remove them from the market. That's what competition is for.

    Caldera has limited resources. They likely can't afford to pay developers to port an operating system to IA64, so that keeps OpenUNIX on IA32. Meanwhile, Linux is being ported to IA64 by open-source developers, so Caldera gets that move for the cost of testing, not developing.

    Relax! I doubt any conspiracy is lurking here.

    --
    cheers,
    Andrew
  4. Not moving to Intel's 64 bit platform by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Remember that Caldera has finite resources, they cannot afford to port the system to many architectures. That might be a good move, considering the fact that Intel's IA-64 architecture has not made significant inroads into the market. Now if they move it to AMD's Hammer series or the alternative 64 bit extension to the IA-32 processor family that would make sense.

  5. Re:LINUX FUCKING SUCKS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    I've just spent EIGHT FUCKING HOURS trying to get this piece of shit laptop to dial up fucking Earthlink. "wvdial" JUST FUCKING DOESN'T WORK.

    Really? I've never had any trouble with wvdial on debian, or the kppp setup wizard on RedHat. That's what I've always admired about Linux: things Just Work. That hasn't been my experience with Windows, where it takes five minutes to whiz through the wizard, and then things almost work, and then you're screwed. Obviously our experiences have been very different.

    Is there ANYONE on earth who thinks Linux is ready for the average person???

    It takes 5 seconds to set this up under Windows.

    Windows isn't ready for the average person. Neither is Linux (See what I said above). Some things work nicely under Windows, I'm sure, and I've found that most things work nicely under Linux, though obviously not for you. The fact is that the average person isn't ready to use complicated equipment like general purpose computers. Average people manage to kill themselves with toasters!

  6. Re:Most people will miss this interesting footnote by buckeyeguy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, but having done the SVR3 generation of Unix (incl. older Dynix/PTX for Unisys platforms, egaaaaddds), it's better to look back and say "wow, I'm glad I don't have to deal with the quirks anymore". Or the days where making it Internet ready meant you had to hack somebody's BSD sockets package to get things connected... hehe, when 'networking' meant UUCP. Those are good old days I can do without.

    --
    I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.