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An Objective Review of UnixWare 7.1.4
Roblimo writes "Yes, SCO is evil and all that, but in between lawsuits it still puts out a product called UnixWare. NewsForge decided to review the latest version -- 7.1.4 -- just like we would any other Unix-based operating system. To ensure impartiality, we hired respected freelancer Logan G. Harbaugh, who wrote: 'On the server side, UnixWare Enterprise edition is more expensive for 150 users than either Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition, any of the Enterprise Linux distributions, or Solaris, with fewer available applications, fewer drivers for recent HBAs and other new hardware, and no currently available 64-bit version for either Opteron or Itanium processors.'"
I was in a unixware shop many years ago, and the best thing I like about it was a piece of software called Merge. But a couple years ago, Win4lin, came out for Linux. This was back in the multi-cpu 486 days, made a great call center server with a hundred operators on it. Other than than the printer queue's fscking up, it was stable. But I was already running BSD for any server I was tasked to engineer.
Today, I dont really see a reason to use unixware. The software is all GPL'ed software you can download on most platforms, and Solaris and Linux have better support.
Just my 2cents.
Well, the actual introduction to the review reads:
UnixWare 7.1.4 is the latest in a long line of Unix releases from The SCO Group. It is a stable and mature Unix, with a variety of basic servers included, such as the Apache Web server and Squid, and is available in both single-user desktop-oriented versions and server versions. It has reasonable support for hardware, good documentation, and a nice integrated management utility that offers unified administration of the OS, hardware, and servers. Performance as a server platform is good, supporting a number of TCP sessions and Web server users, and file transfer performance is competitive with Linux and Windows platforms. However, as a desktop OS or file/print server, UnixWare is hard to recommend over competitors.
And the actual conclusion:
UnixWare 7.1.4 offers some high quality Unix features including OS stability and security, disk replication, a decent GUI management package, Windows emulation, good documentation, and a reasonable suite of server applications. However, the relatively high prices for adding multiple users and CPUs, high cost of the support package, and relative dearth of available software since the LKP package was removed make UnixWare hard to justify as a file/print or mail server, or desktop OS. It would make a good Web server or application server.
Doesn't sound quite as bad as the slasdot summary, does it?
Did you READ the article?
... of course, I admit to being biased. That he still decides it's a bad choice merely echos what most of the market has already decided, so it's hard to call that biased.
It's written by an "independant reviewer" because Newsforge didn't trust anyone on staff to qualify as unbiased.
He says nicer things about the product than I would
My main quibble with him is that he didn't factor in their history of suing their clients, but that's actually reasonably fair, as SCOX has so far only gone after deep pockets. (Still, I would consider it sufficient reason in and of itself to avoid the company.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Out of all of them, SCO has always been the biggest nightmare to setup and sysadmin out of all of them.
- The SCO documentation is rubbish. It was spread over a huge number of volumes that took you hours to try and find the answer to any problem
- Bearing in mind that SCO's an x86 UNIX, the driver support is minimal
- No publishers have ever taken much interest in writing specific books for it. Aside from generic UNIX books, there's not a lot else compared to the very good books on all the UNIXes
- Even Evi Nemeth's "UNIX System Administration Handbook" (the UNIX bible for those who don't know) has never even mentioned it (at least in the 2nd & 3rd editions I have) whereas even IRIX and DEC OSF/1 get their own sections!
- I don't even remember it coming with a C compiler by default
IMHO SCO is UNIX from the Dark Ages.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
There are a lot of interesting observations in the review, including:
Well...if anything infringes on the GPL (basically SCO included anything GPL Licensed and didn't include source code) wouldn't the remedy be that SCO has to open source their software??? ooooh the delicious irony....
No. See the actual license This is far from what would happen.
As I understand it(IANAL), any GPL software that they include must have the source available (but only to the people THEY distributed the binaries to) by any reasonable means (mail for cost of media+handling, ftp, http, etc) or they have no authority to distribute it. It would not effect their proprietary software.
If they refused to make source to the same people they made binaries available to, they would be in violation of the GPL, and would have to stop distributing those GPL packages. A judge would have to decide if their actions constitute infringement on the owners copyright in a case brought to the court by the actual copyright holder. At that point, a judge would issue an injuction, disallowing SCO from distributing the one (or more) packages named in that specific suit. Other damages may be awarded, theoretically, but rarely.
At any time (and possibly at the last minute) they could agree to allow access to their modified GPL source, and the case would be more or less moot. They would instantly be in compliance with the license. Still, it has no bearing on their own closed source applications.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
We use Unixware 7 at work. It was the system recommended by a specific software vendor at the time (and that is the only application we run on the box).
/etc configure what services, this entire area of development is missing. Again, refer to points 1 and 2 and see what a nightmare this could potentially be.
We have been trying to identify the best migration plan for the following reasons:
- SCO's lack of hardware makes upgrading a nightmare of its own. With Windows and Linux, I can buy virtually anything (server hardware, that is) and expect it to "just work".
- The fact that SCO is at least at serious risk of collapse in the foreseeable future means that we now need to keep a copy of the hardware compatibility list and Unixware installation media in case of catastrophe (see point 1 and now imagine no tech support). This is a non-concern with any other reasonable alternative.
- Documentation sucks. From man pages either being non-existent or missing critical information such as what files in
- Related to the last point, Unixware expects you to use the scoadmin tool to do everything, including configure network cards. The location of even a basic ifconfig file is well hidden. To make this matter worse, scoadmin is non-intuitive to maneuver and also does not support termcap/terminfo -- you must use an ANSI terminal or the display will be garbled. Our vendor provides a custom telnet application to ensure you are always in ANSI.
- No support of PAM. We would like to simply integrate our logins with our Windows domain controller. Not possible with Unixware.
The very recent adoption of open source tools is actually the best thing they've done. In the version we have installed, SCO included VisionFS which provides SMB shares but is just not the same quality as Samba. More recent versions have dropped VisionFS and added more open source tools.
That's a quick review off the top of my head from somebody who uses it every day and looks forward to the day that we can be done with it.