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Adios, Caldera; Hello, SCO Group
An anonymous reader writes: "Caldera International, the company that sprang from Novell and went on to distribute a Linux distribution popular among users before the company's decision to withdraw from the retail desktop market, is no more. Instead, what was once Caldera is now 'the SCO Group.'
The change, announced at the company's 'GeoFORUM' conference in Las Vegas Monday, recognizes Caldera's acquisition of SCO Unix, and follows what former employees claimed was a switch in emphasis from Caldera OpenLinux to SCO Unix. At the same time, the company announced a new business plan, called 'SCOx,' and new versions of its Unix and Linux distributions. Details, which combine a multitude of press releases, are on Linux and Main."
It has been long since I have seen as confusing messaging, this seems almost like a joke. It does not make any sense at all.
In fact I've never heard that, and I've administered Solaris, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, SCO OpenServer, and UnixWare. OpenServer was absolutely the worst Unix I've ever had the misfortune to use. UnixWare was tolerable, but still not up to the standards set by the others. Linux doesn't have all the high-end features, but it's just nicer to use.
I think there was a window where SCO could have produced their own Linux distro and kept their user base, but they missed their chance. Legacy SCO will be around for a while, but new projects are going to Linux - mostly RedHat.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
>However, I disagree with you and all others (seems
>to be 90% of posters here) who claim that SCO is
>failing in the market. First of all, everybody
>who has worked with UnixWare described it as one
>of the best Unix on any platform.
I've got SCO ACE certification in Openserver and Unixware, SCO Master ACE certification in Non-Stop Clusters and Openserver, and supported as far back as SCO Unix 3.2v4.0 and Unixware 1.1 (as a legacy product after it was purchased by SCO).
Openserver was a nightmare to work with. First off, just BUYING it was a task. Need a licence for the operating system, tcp/ip support, multiple processor support, disk mirroring, and whatever user count you need. If it was an upgrade, you had to know what version you were coming from, how many users you had licensed, what units they were licenced in, etc, etc.
Then you get to buying the hardware to install it on, and half the supported hardware is discontinued. Whoops.
Finally get a system to put it on, and you're greeting with a picky installed worse than what Redhat had on version 3.0.3, which you complete only to have to start the arduous task of installing all the patches and hardware supplements - RS505, OSS471, OSS491, OSS600, etc. And God help you if you accidently installed one out of order, because then its time to roll back, reapply, and pray it goes smoothly so you don't have to reinstall.
After installing nothing but the base operating system and the vendor supplied patches, its time to run a verify on the operating system, because oft times there'd already be issues with permissions and symlinks.
Then maybe you'd want to do a backup to your shiny new DAT drive. Whoops, have to relink the kernel for that. And as you manually type in the location of your tape drive, you accidently put in the wrong bus. When you notice your error you try to delete the device and add it correctly, but it won't go away. Turns out you have to manually edit six different files scattered across the filesystem, including the kernel headers.
Mind you, Unixware was better... at least Unixware 7 was. However the initial releases were buggy as hell, and were a bizarre mixture of SysV, Netwarisms, and Openserverisms.
I think their best bet for carving a niche for themselves was the Non-stop Cluster product. Platform aside, it was a pretty damn slick single system image cluster. I got to play with some of the first ones in existence, and actually built out four of them (two on my own, one while I was assisting a SCO instructor doing an on-site training, and one at an advance training out in Santa Cruz)). Very cool stuff, though it suffered from the expected flakiness of a new product; doubly so since it was built on a brand new operating system.
Unfortunately, it seems that they never managed to capture any marketshare, and from what I can see on the website, it looks like they only offer a high availability solution now.
So what do these products have to offer the market now aside from legacy support, and a few niche markets which are slow to change?
Matt