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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.'"
It would be interesting to see the degree to which UnixWare copes with recent hardware: HyperThreading P4's, nForce2 chipsets, IEEE 1394, SATA RAID, etc etc etc.
If you thought
ONE BILLION DOLLARS MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH?
Disclaimer: Prices may vary. Check your local retailer. Senseless litigation available in most locations. All rights reserved or acquired in court against your will.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
I thought the author did fairly well at remaining objective and testing the product without allowing company ethics cloud his review
I predict that somebody'll get modded up for explaining why SCO's distro sucks.
"Derp de derp."
Attn: Tony Bourke
Read your review. Hope you enjoy court and jailtime, because I'm about to sue you into oblivion. Next time you'll know whose side you should be on. Best of luck to you and your lawyers (or lack thereof)!
Your friend,
Darl
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.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Wait, this might be the first "$X is dying" troll that's actually true.
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
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=sco.com
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
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
"There is no reason to use such an expensive, restrictive OS..."
It's only $100 more than Linux...
What?
"The Unixware product will no longer be marketable under the "SCO" name..."
Which will probably "confuse the build scripts" even more.
What?
You can't spell fiasco without SCO
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.
It's interesting how the prices compare:
Enterprise Linux doesn't seem to offer an advantage unless you're using four or more processors. Solaris (and, Java Desktop, I assume) seems to be a better deal for regular workstations or servers... I imagine that only high-end servers and "mainframes" seem to benefit from the price. No wonder Red Hat doesn't see a future for desktop Linux... they're prices are too expensive!
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
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.
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.