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SCO UnixWare 7.1.3 Review
JigSaw writes "Despite news about SCO being all about the lawsuit, they still sell OS products and they have a presence in the server market. UnixWare is one of these OS products. Tony Bourke reviewed its latest version, 7.1.3, and even includes benchmarks among other tests. Tony concludes that 'the lack of commercial applications and user community, the difficulty with open source applications, the SCO litigation, and the high price are all marks against UnixWare. There are just very few reasons to adopt UnixWare as your platform, and plenty of reasons to adopt (or migrate to) other platforms.'"
McDonalds, last I knew, had thousands of terminals running SCO in their locations. Retail is their biggest presence. I also used to work somewhere (a non-profit) that had an old Informix database running on an even older SCO box.
Not that I support it or anything... =]
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
First off, why is such a worthless OS front page news on /.? SCO Unix is mediocre, and nobody would even think of using it. The only reason a SCO Unix review is on /. is because of the lawsuit hubbub.
I was poking through the SCO web site some time ago, to find good stuff for my SCO Report website and I discover SCObiz. Check it out. For $5,000, they'll basically give you a template site, with mediocre ecommerce ability. The datasheet is here (pdf), while the quick facts (pdf) is here. A Flash tour is here.
The Flash tour is pretty snappy, but you can tell, it's nothing more than a glorified template driven website builder for newbies, similar to what Tripod and Geocities provide with their drag and drop stuff. It's probably even worse.
Remember to visit SCO Report, where I do my part to annoy SCO with the truth, and SCO Countdown, where there are clocks counting down to SCO's demise...
UnixWare isn't a Linux distro.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Does anyone know of any organizations that actually use SCO Unix?
Which SCO Unix? There are basically two, UnixWare being the subject of the post. The other is left as an exercise for the reader.
I know of a injection molding facility that monitors about 50 multi-million dollar presses 24x7 with UnixWare. It runs a vertical app that does alerting (voice announcement, paging, calls) and gathers stats.
UnixWare was an early (first?) commercial implementation of UNIX on i386 hardware. A lot of geeks were pretty excited by it long ago. This mattered because it meant that you could deploy UNIX apps cheaply. So, a lot of vertical apps were ported and UnixWare became pretty widespread. It was a fairly plain-jane port of UNIX with credible-enough vendor support to make it possible to sell products based on it without having customers retch on your shoes. It was an easy port from other UNIX platforms, and this was probably it's main claim to fame. The other being almost-workable integration with Netware fileservers (after Novell acquired it.) I am amused when I remember how it seemed pretty obvious to me that whoever was responsible for that Novell integration piece was learning UNIX in the process.
Just because SCO owns UnixWare doesn't make UnixWare bad. It's largely obsolete now, but 10 years ago if you wanted to run UNIX on i386 hardware, UnixWare (or whatever it might have been called in late 1993) was a good choice. There are products running happily on UnixWare today, their users utterly unaware of the legal hoopla.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The article was well-written and, I felt, fairly objective. My thanks to Mr. Bourke for keeping a level head when many are screaming bloody blue murder. For those who just want the meat, here it is:
These factors precluded the reviewer from really thinking of a single situation in which he could recommend UnixWare 7.1.3 as an installable option.