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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.

2 of 312 comments (clear)

  1. Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This article has one of its most important facts wrong. In the list of UNIX operating systems, there's no mention of IRIX, which is a UNIX98-certified and Open Group approved UNIX operating system.

    I quit reading at that point. If the author can't be bothered to get the most basic (and trivially verifiable) facts right, why shoudl I waste my time reading what he has to say?

  2. what SCO does offer... by Trailer+Trash · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In looking over these tables, one can't help but wonder why SCO's UnixWare and OpenServer are even mentioned. They offer nothing over GNU/Linux, *BSD, BSD/OS, and Solaris, yet UnixWare is astonishingly more expensive than its competitors.

    In every single instance that I've seen SCO installed, it's been running a vertical market application running on unibase. The single biggest factor driving SCO sales has been a varitable legion of programmers and resellers who are making money from programs that were written 10 years ago when SCO made some amount of sense.

    Given that the programs are unique to Unibase, and given that Unibase runs just fine under Linux and has for some years, SCO's market (which is small businesses that are just large enough to spend a few thousand on a computer system up to ~$50M/year businesses that aren't large enough to buy a real Unix system) is running to Linux. I've seen a few VAR's holding out on SCO, but very few and dwindling.

    I have one client still using SCO, and they're doing all they can to leave it. I've been out in the real world as a consultant for 9 years now and in that time I have never (not even one time) heard of or observed a new SCO installation, nor have I found anybody who has even considered it.

    SCO was basically dead a long time ago, I guess nobody bothered to tell them.