SCO Announces Product Line Updates

ArbiterOne writes "Techworld has the story: SCO has unveiled their upcoming product plans, including a new release of UnixWare and a version for point-of-sale devices. Oddly enough, the article states that 'SCO's continuing Unix intellectual property lawsuits against IBM, Novell and others is apparently putting customers off.' I wonder how that could have happened?"

Comments

Wondering...

[JoeShmoe950]

Who actually uses SCO Unixware. I mean, usually any business that wants unix will go with Linux, and in some cases AIX, etc. But who actually uses SCO Unixware, besides SCO (oops, forgot that they were running Linux...)

Aren't they just saying "We screwed up"?

[Pi_0's don't shower]

I mean, it's easy to bash someone. Read the critique from the article:

The continuing efforts to produce a new-product road map less than a year after the last one is an indication that the marketplace is confused by the company and its strategy, said Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst at IDC. "They're seeing that people don't know who they are, and if they don't know who they are, they're not buying from them," he said. The company continues to do a lackluster job in creating brand awareness, and it hasn't been able to create a pull to its products for potential customers, he said. "This is the same conversation that has recurred since the former Santa Cruz Operation [the company's original name] and Caldera [after the merger in 2000] and now SCO."

Isn't is just fair to say that the old strategy wasn't working (as evidenced by the 20% drop in revenue), so they're trying something new? That's what they say -- they're coming out with new products to try and be more competitive...

UnixWare 7.1.4 and the new Smallfoot embedded Unix products are shipping now, while SCOoffice Server 4.1 will ship next month and Vintela Authentication From SCO Release 2.6 will be available in August.

Yeah really....

[afidel]

I interview earlier this year for a position with a large national autoparts chain, while talking about their systems they mentioned that a large amount of their legacy stuff was dialup to UnixWare servers. I asked them what their feelings were re: the longterm viability of SCO and what their contingency plans were if SCO were to fold. They basically said that they had been thinking of moving to Linux but had made no actual moves towards doing so and that they felt that even if SCO folded that someone else would buy the IP and continue the license. I responded that I doubted whoever bought the IP would continue to offer UnixWare but would rather buy it to be able to controll their own Unix product entirely and would drop UnixWare. They didn't seem too pleased with that assesment. Maybe that's why I didn't get the job but I would rather not have been hired on and then asked to clean up the mess in the future!

Re:Yeah really....

[Zathrus]

I responded that I doubted whoever bought the IP would continue to offer UnixWare but would rather buy it to be able to controll their own Unix product entirely and would drop UnixWare. They didn't seem too pleased with that assesment.

Probably because your assesment showed a lack of knowledge about the size of UnixWare's deployment.

UnixWare (and OpenServer) licensing represents >$40M of revenue. You think anyone who buys it is just going to kiss that goodbye? Hell no. Anyone with a clue will buy it and then promptly offer a transition program over a course of 2-5 years for existing customers.

Yeah, in a decade UnixWare may only be running on a few systems without support (and perhaps a lot of systems still with support -- if all you have to do is employ a half dozen employees for tech support and patches, and you have customer willing to pay you $1M/year for that, hey... a 50%+ profit margin isn't bad), but it's not like they're going to vanish overnight. Nor will product support. There will be a transitional phase, just like there is for any product where the vendor didn't simply go Chapter 7/11 and nobody bought the remains.

Realistically we know that there is no value to the SCO source. UnixWare and OpenServer are both archaic by modern standards, not to mention buggy. So why would anyone buy the products except to get the existing user base? And if you get the user base, what freaking good does it do you to then tell them to bend over and enjoy the ride?

Samba

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Wonder if Samba and nmap are included? Including Samba would be just arrogant after Samba made this statement. As far as nmap, SCO would be basically inviting a lawsuit after Fyodor said this:

"SCO Corporation of Lindon, Utah (formerly Caldera) has lately taken to an extortion campaign of demanding license fees from Linux users for code that they themselves knowingly distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. They have also refused to accept the GPL, claiming that some preposterous theory of theirs makes it invalid (and even unconstitutional)! Meanwhile they have distributed GPL-licensed Nmap in (at least) their "Supplemental Open Source CD". In response to these blatant violations, and in accordance with section 4 of the GPL, we hereby terminate SCO's rights to redistribute any versions of Nmap in any of their products, including (without limitation) OpenLinux, Skunkware, OpenServer, and UNIXWare. We have also stopped supporting the OpenServer and UNIXWare platforms."

Re:Any good Karma?

[bstadil]

I think the problem that SCO will have for many years

Years? They will run out of cash in 4 - 7 quarters.

7 quarters at current burn rate, 4 with accelerating expenses if the trails get underway.

SCO resellers disapearing quickly..

[jaclu]

By coincidence I wisited their homepage yesterday, just to see who actually resells SCO nowadays (the list is impessivly short).

(Im in the middle of moving a client away from a SCO solution)

In USA, there where no resellers listed, just corporate HQ, and 2 branchoffices.

In Germany and UK I belive it was 3, Sweden and Finland one, Africa one, middle-east one (Isreael)

I didnt check all of them, but those I did check was not actually involved in SCO anymore, when I called them theyy got slightly embarresed to be connected to SCO, and told me that they recomended me to convert to Solaris or RedHat, depending on workload (wich they offered to help me with). They blamed SCO that they where still listed, they had terminated all connections some 4 month and 8 month agp

Re:SCO has a product?

[rkhalloran]

They bought some rights to code, it's doubtful (given the Novell suit) that they got the copyrights to it. The licenses they inherited from AT&T said any code added on remained the property of those developers; only if they carried in SysV code as part of it did it need to be protected.

Nobody's asking them to give their code away, nobody wants it. They want SCO to stop claiming they own the independently-developed Linux code that IBM brought features to, the same as they brought JFS, NUMA, etc. to AIX from their other OS'.

SCO's business is floundering, and they've stooped to nuisance suits against a deep-pocketed IBM claiming they own AIX/Dynix, thinking they'd be bought out, but instead have drawn the attention of the Pinstripe Nazgul onto themselves. The end result is likely to be a smoking crater in Lindon where once stood SCO. And the rest of us will bring marshmallows.

Re:SCO Has Products?

[Tenareth]

Easy there... you would be hard pressed to find anyone besides Mormons that considers Mormons to be "Christians".