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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.'"
I thought the author did fairly well at remaining objective and testing the product without allowing company ethics cloud his review
I think their UNIX business will get spun off after the lawsuit business clears up and the company goes bust. The Unixware product will no longer be marketable under the "SCO" name, since the brand will be indelibly tarnished in the IT world as part of a hostile, litigious organization that tried to extort money from companies, big and small, for work that they had no rights to, and for what essentially amounts to a massive pump-n-dump scheme.
Of all the bad PR that they've generated for themselves, a bad product may hurt them the most. Now, they open themselves up to the counter-attack that they're an untalented software company looking for a quick buck, with the product being proof of their lack of talent. It's an oversimplification, sure, but one they pretty richly deserve.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Unixware proves that sometimes, (an increasingly small number of) people buy things based on price alone. There is no reason to use such an expensive, restrictive OS when the makers of that OS have to use ideas from their biggest competitor to improve it, when that competitor is a free (in all meanings) OS.
Let's not get into the specific advantages, because nobody has that large an attention span.
Esoteric reference.
He is untarring the tcsh distribution so he could compile it. tcsh includes support for Windows.
We're not talking about desktop users here. For the people that may want to use either UnixWare or Linux, Linux supports those features while UnixWare does not. Less sophisticated users should stay far, far from either Linux or UnixWare, "The Unix That Crashes (TM)". Scaring up a custom kernel is not exactly rocket science.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Application vendors are dropping support for SCO right and left, so really, the level of hardware support is irrelevant.
I find it hard to believe that any company that has made the dire mistake of tying themselves so closely to SCO as a platform would not be actively investigating any possible option to remove themselves from any involvement at all with a clearly doomed company.
Their product is worthless, and their user base is so miniscule as to make it counter productive to expend the cash required to qualify product against SCO.
And the more that happens, the worse it will get for those who persist.
What good is an OS distribution when no one makes applications for it anymore, and those that did DROP support for it completely, because it's cheaper to lose a miniscule number of customers than to spend time and money supporting the OS they use?
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Uh... isn't that the same reason all the Microsoft zealots use for saying Windows is better?
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
LKP is basicly system call emulation like that which is available in FreeBSD. This has NOTHING to do with pure user-space number crunching required of crypto computations! This kind of test would only show the most eggregrarious scheduling or interrupt handler errors in providing the LKP functionality. This wouldn't (shouldn't?) even show up any compiler differences between UnixWare's cc and GCC since OpenSSL is heavily assembly optimzed on x86.
These numbers arn't even compared to running under a real Linux kernel, which would be the most logical course of action given the reviewer's incomplete understanding.
But regardless, with comments like the following, it becomes painfully obvious the reviewer knows little about this:
If anything, benchmarking system calls should have been done. Something along the lines of these tests.
The reviewer makes his bias very plain with passages such as:
This combined with the lack of objective and useful benchmarks makes this article little more than a piece of cheerleading propoganda.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Unixware is basically the same thing as Solaris.
>>>>>>>>>>>
No, it isn't. They're both derived from SVR4, but all the performance insanity that Sun put into Solaris went in *after* the split.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It supports SATA and IDE RAID, but the drivers aren't there for a lot of controllers. You could say that's hardly support at all, but by that logic you could also say because Linux doesn't support Brand X video card, Linux doesn't support graphics.
There's a difference between driver support and feature support. Linux supports these features. Drivers, as usual, depend on vendor specs, vendor support, and ease of reverse-engineering.
Last time I served in it, the Armed Forces of Sweden were still running SCO Unix for a lot of communications control computers. The systems were very buggy and would often crash. When I left they were just starting to migrate over to (customized) FreeBSD boxes and Windows NT. Now, knowing the Swedish army, I know they are NOT an organization that changes it ways unless it desperately has to (despite what their PR keeps saying). So if they're dropping SCO .. well .. I used their old systems myself, so I know pretty well how much they suck. It's all over for SCO. When all the legal bullshit is done and over with, there'll be nothing but bones left, and maybe the world will be rid of the horror that is UnixWare.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
That's easy to say, but if you have critical infrastructure built around SCO it's not like you can just wake up one day and say "Hmmm, this doesn't look good, how about we abandon all those production servers and build something completely different." In business, things that work and are supported don't get touched without good reason, especially if megabucks have been spent getting to that point. It doesn't matter if SCO doesn't have shit for features or doesn't support the latest doodads. It's in production in a number of places and you can't just yank the rug out from under a business like that.
It's one thing to denounce SCO for being the assholes that they are, but it's another completely different thing to actually move away from something that critical without a LOT of planning and testing. Sure, you get started on that as soon as possible, but it takes time. YOu can't just say "SCO's irrelevant now" because to some businesses, it's very relevant -- for better or worse.
I'm not saying that it represents necessarily good decision making on the part of those companies... But I'm just pointing out that it's all too common to have some random server running some random application (that's probably itself very old) that's crutial to the business. Nobody in the company has ever tried it with any other platform, nobody knows if it would work, no one knows how long it would take to switch formats or port the app, nobody knows how long it would be down while all this is going on, etc. When you have a situation like this that's crutial to the business functions of the company and it's working and supported, it's going to be an uphill battle to convince anyone to change, ESPECIALLY to commodity and/or "community supported" stuff.
Please, don't take this as me trying to justify SCO's crapware in any respect. I'm just trying to point out that if you spend a lot of time in open source circles it's very easy to get this skewed version of things in which it's inexplicable why any company wouldn't have burned every last piece of SCO media and torn up every support contract after months of this lawsuit garbage and years of crappy software that's going nowhere. You'll find that businesses often have tons of random legacy junk sitting around that's still useful, and to keep it running it makes more sense from a business standpoint to keep paying SCO for support contracts or upgrades, regardless of the merits of SCO's software. SCO knows this, and they have to play into it if they want to survive... (Or at least, a semi-sane SCO before all this lawsuit crap. Now they've pretty much made it impossible to survive post-lawsuit.)
It's kind of like the tale ('Signs'?) where the car runs over the man and pins him against a tree or wall or something, holding his innards in place. You know that his game is up sooner or later but you also know that moving the car is going to make a huge mess with his guts oozing out everywhere...so it's best to just keep things as they are for as long as possible until at least the EMT arrives and he has a slight chance of surviving.