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Why SCO UNIX Is A Bad Idea
Ashcrow writes "SCO UNIX has long boasted its 'true UNIX' code base, but is that really the case? A story running at The Jem Report looks into SCO's claims and holds it up to other UNIX variants to try and find validity for SCO's claims." The author has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but worth reading for the comparison of various *nix's.
SCO's own UNIX products, and the copyright and other rights sco owns with regards to the genetic UNIX codebase are two different things entirely.
Whether or not SCO UNIX sucks or not has no actual bearing on their lawsuit.
(from the article) When people think of server UNIX, they think of SCO. hhahahahaha. Mod +5 funny.
I usually think of Sun, or HP, or AIX. But not SCO.
Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape
The problem with OSX is the pricing. You have regular price increases and need to buy a new OS every year. Hell, Jaguar has only been out 11 months and now it's dead. Who are you going to go to for support after Panther comes out?
For long term use a product with a lifetime more than a year or two is absolutely mandatory. Once you have a working system, stick to it. It's not as easy with OSX as it is with other systems.
There are a lot of technical articles of why not to cower to SCO... unfortunately I think the main audience is being ignored: executive, business people in charge of the cash money. I would think most techies know SCO is full of it. A lot of execs (but not all) don't and are pretty clueless. Sadly, I rarely see any articles on the Wall Street Journel or Forbes with this article's message.
In fact - there are a number of requirements in HIPAA with respect to accountability and privacy which run rather counter to the more traditional requirement/compromizes made in military systems where both hierachy and the desire to do counter-intelligence are fundamentally different. And thus each need its own set of engineering compromises.
This is why just sprinkle some 'trusted unix' as pixy dust - and pretend you are HIPAA compliant is just not working :-)
But seriously - do read up on it; the HIPAA standards (http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/) are surprizingly readable and actually very preceise with clear lists of requirements. Almost a checklist.
Dw
So skip a version or two. It won't kill you.
I went from Mac OS 10.0 to Jaguar. The world didn't end...
Support isn't that much of an issue. Most of the support issues happen at the beginning of the products lifespan, not at the end.
I know someone who has run Mac OS 9 for at least 3 years. She's got the programs she needs and she never has a problem.
Stop feeding the beast and you'll find you won't miss it as much.
My father is a blogger.
UNIX is a registered trademark of the Open Group in the United States and other countries. UNIX is available as a branding for operating systems which are certified by the open group to comply to various levels of the Single Unix Specification, a national and international standard. One such system, compliant at Unix95 level is OS/390 by Ibm with compatability extensions. This system is stated by the Open Group to not be derived from any AT&T code. You can find out more about the Single Unix Specification and UNIX in general at www.unix.org. While you're there you can familiarize yourself with the terms of their "license."
Well, linux is not unix. Technically... though this article seems to believe otherwise. Several of the BSDs (though I'm not sure which, FreeBSD and NetBSD maybe) have ancestries which can be traced back to real unix. Linux is more closely related (at least in terms of origin) to *shutter* Minix.
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Crudely Drawn Games
There have been no price increases. None. Mac OS X has held steady at roughly $130 per release since version 10.0.
You don't *have* to buy the new version. The old ones continue to work perfectly well. People generally upgrade because they want to.
The sole reasons for NEEDING to upgrade circle around application support (Well, and the relatively poor performance of OS X previous to 10.2. If you want to bitch about THAT, I won't stop you, but that is in the past.), as some applications use API enhancements that only work with a certain OS X version or later. However, from what I have seen, this is ONLY a problem with 1) Free software, either iApps from apple or software from the freeware/shareware community, and 2) Incredibly high-end software that you are paying well, well more than $130 for anyway. Outside of those two sets of applications, OS X app vendors have been relatively good about supporting a spread of OS X versions. The Mac OS 10.3 developer tools, incidentally, contain new features specifically designed to make it easier to target multiple Mac OS X versions. You can hardly complain of having to pay money every year and a half so that you can continue to use free software.
"Having a working system and sticking with it" isn't really an issue since historically, Mac OS X upgrades have not broken existing software, and thus required little change in your system upon upgrade. If you don't like sitting every year and a half through an hour's worth of install procedure.. uh.. well.. then, sorry.
OS X upgrades are comparable to Windows upgrades, when you consider that, as far as i can tell, Microsoft OS upgrades are rarer but cost more. OS X pricing cannot of course compare to linux pricing no matter WHAT apple does.
Upgrading every time Apple releases an OS upgrade is an added cost, but it is not a significant cost when you realize you are ALREADY probably paying a decent amount more money for your computer than you would be with an x86 box merely to be able to run OS X in the first place!
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This site, http://www.levenez.com/unix/, has an historical timeline of *ALL* the Unix variants. One thing I don't see is anything crossing over from SCO to Linux. I do see SCO taking some stuff from Linux. Maybe Linus is owed some royalties?
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Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
If I remember right, The Open Group has revoked Apple's use of the UNIX trademark, because Apple didn't feel like continuing to pay the certification fees anymore. They were an open-group certified UNIX at first, but not anymore.
This may or may not have been the article author's reason for not including Mac OS X. I'm not sure. He did seem to be gathering his list of UNIXes directly from the Open Group website, though.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Here is a number for SCO licensing for Linux. Lets see if we can make it slighty more expensive to do what they want to do.
/. and SCO will ignore us, but like any business, they WILL pay attention to the pocketbook.
We can all bitch and complain on
Capitulate or escalate. the choice is ours!
SCO's claims for the SMP and other code rely on an expansive notion of derivative copyright. SCO didn't actually write any of the code in question. They are claiming ownership essentially because some versions of that code were written as a part of Unix, and SCO claims that that makes the code a derivative work of Unix.
SCO goes further to claim that pretty much any connection between the code for which they claim ownership and the code contributed to Linux means that SCO owns the code contributed to Linux. For example, SCO claims that they own the JFS code contributed to Linux even though they admit that code was initially developed for OS/2, because the first version of the JFS code was developed using Unix, and some of the same people worked on the first version of JFS and the version of JFS which was contributed to Linux.
So, simply replacing the code in Linux isn't that simple. If there is any similarity, such as, perhaps, functional equivalence, SCO will claim that the new code is really a derivative work of the old code, and therefore a derivative work of Unix.
The only step which would avoid SCO's claim is a clean room implementation of Linux--a massive project which nobody is going to undertake.
Now, I happen to think that SCO's expansive claims won't hold up in court. But then SCO cares a lot more about spreading FUD now, and making some money on Unixware licenses now, then they care about winning in court in five years.
Anyhow, my point is that your simple tactic won't work. It won't make Linux more likely to win in court--Linux is already likely to win in court. It won't make SCO shut up--nothing will make SCO shut up.
Author says: "But there are so many more choices out there, the least of which offers a dearth of advantages over SCO's Unix products." Dictionary says: Main Entry: dearth Pronunciation: 'd&rth Function: noun Etymology: Middle English derthe, from (assumed) Old English dierth, from dEore dear Date: 13th century 1 : scarcity that makes dear; specifically : FAMINE 2 : an inadequate supply : LACK So to me it looks as though this gentleman is suggesting that the lesser *NIX clones have an inadequate amount of advantages compared to Unix... Subliminally funded by SCO, perhaps...
However, officially no contemporary BSD contains a single line of original Unix code - at least that's the official outcome of a former lawsuit rather similar to todays SCO issue. Incidentally, this lawsuite happened in the early days of the FreeBSD project, which also lost its prime developer some time earlier. It took about a year for them to get back to a usable system with all offending code removed. It was also in the time of the beginning of the rise of Linux (early to mid nineties) - some BSD old-timers still like to muse about whether BSD would be dominant today rather than Linux if this legal battle hadn't happened.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
This paralegal disagrees with your claim.
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http://radio.weblogs.com/0120124/2003/06/30.htm
So, FSF holds the copyrights to all of IBM's contributions to the kernel "for use with IBM's S/390 mainframe computers" and yet SCO hasn't even contacted, or worse, responded to FSF contacts, in order to identify any allegedly infringing code?
This is a significant piece of news, because it'll be mighty hard down the road to claim damages for copyright infringement, certainly for this time period and maybe at all, if SCO isn't lifting a finger to mitigate its damages and is allowing infringement without protest. You can lose your rights by doing exactly that. If you read what I wrote about Judge Kimball, on June 10, you'll find a case where a plaintiff lost his copyright because he allowed it for too long before protesting.
Ummm.... Hello?
He included Linux and the BSDs, niether of which is considered to be an official UNIX(TM) by the Open Group.
Apple claims that MacOS X is UNIX-based, which is a perfectly valid claim. So why this guy left MacOS X off his list is a legitamate question.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
SCO UNIX is the equivalent of a..... No, a bicycle is too kind of a description
SCO is the equivalent of a 250 tonne ore truck, powered by a lawnmower engine.
The initial list is said to be restricted to UNIX variants that are certified UNIX98 compliant. I have no clue whether or not IRIX meets that requirement for inclusion.
what's not proper about the SMP implementations in FreeBSD (5.x) and NetBSD?
Scaling. BSD works great on two CPUs, but not 16 or 32. Any operating system can support X CPUs just be changing a define, but a lot of work went into making Linux 2.6 perform great on massively parallel boxes.
I believe that the judge assigned to the case (or has another been assigned in his place) actually found in favor of the defendant in a previous copyright lawsuit because the plaintiff made no effort to mitigate damages.
In particular, the defendant wrote a book incorporating part of the plaintiff's. He sent a copy of the book asking the plaintiff if it was okay with him.
The plaintiff made no effort to read the book at all and did not decide to file a lawsuit until, I think, the third book was published.
Someone else posted a link to a news story about the case a few weeks ago.
OpenVMS wasn't a rewrite. It was a name DEC's marketing department slapped on VMS with POSIX extensions after the fact. It was, essentially, completely marketing. And there's no reason why anyone at DEC would have been considering a rewrite of the entire OS just to add POSIX functionality.
It's quite possible NT's designer used ideas he'd been considering implementing at DEC. That's not really the same as "Microsoft took an unreleased never-quite-developed version of VMS and finished it off, slapping the name "NT" onto it".
NT's actual origins are as what was supposed to be OS/2 version 3, which is part of the reason why NT has more in common with OS/2 than VMS... It's an amalgam of Windows (the main API was a 32 bit port of the original Windows 2/3 API), OS/2 (the original text-based OS/2 API is also sitting on there) and a kernel that's clearly influenced by VMS but has little in common. That kernel was originally a microkernel (VMS is monolithic), just as one example.
Really the whole VMS/NT thing is completely overstated and has reached the level of an urban legend. Sharing a designer does not make one thing a clone of another, even if inevitably some ideas from one will make it into the other. Microsoft certainly took enough ideas from VMS to make it nervous (it paid DEC a one-off settlement), but that doesn't change the fact that anyone looking at the two operating systems will see two different designs, entirely different APIs, entirely different user interfaces and shells, entirely different end-user functionality... they're about as similar, in practice, as UNIX and AmigaDOS.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
USB is present in SCO. OpenServe 5.0.7 has support for keyboards, mice, floppy, and mass storage (both optical and magnetic). Sure it doesn't do your digital camera, but that doesn't belong on a server.
Serial ATA is still in it's infancy and more support will be added, but it is supported. I beleive that you are correct that firewire is not currently supported.
Sound really isn't an issue for a server. When was the last time you saw a rack mount 5.1 surround sound system?
Video is supported with SCO. Sure your high end ATI 9700 Pro All-In-Wonder with quad DVI output isn't going to be optimized, but once again, it's a server. A low end graphics card would be more then enough for a server.
As for NICs, sure high end nics are supported. I'm sitting across from a 10/100/1000 BroadCom Gigabit card running fine. SCO's HCL for gigabit NICs includes Intel, Broadcom, 3Com, Compaq, and IBM. I'm sure there is a "high-end" in there somewhere.
As for backup devices, I'm not really sure what you are thinking about. Tape drives are supported. CD/DVD recorders are supported. These are probably the most common server archival methods.
Depending on which version of VMWare, the only qualified guest OSs are Windows, Linux, MS-DOS, Netware, and FreeBSD. I don't see IRIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Xenix, or AIX? It's not the OS's responsibility to make sure it runs under VMWare. SCO runs on actual hardware. If VMWare doesn't emulate the hardware exactly as the OS would see it, whose fault is that?
My current employer currently uses OpenServer. It currently works for us. Sure a "free" OS is appealing. Yes SCO looks like an ass lately. And you are correct that SCO driver support isn't the greatest...you just have to be choosey on what hardware you purchase.