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They Make Stuff? SCO's OpenServer 6 Reviewed

Posted by timothy on from the make-messes-in-sandboxes dept.

turnitover writes "And here I thought their revenue was all based on projected lawsuit returns. But no, The SCO Group actually has turned out something that does something -- or does it? In any case, looks like eWEEK has reviewed OpenServer 6. From the review: though the company 'seems like an unlikely outlet for open-source software, the company has extended OpenServer with updated versions of Samba, Perl, PHP and other key components.'"

5 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. You won't catch me upgrading by stevey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've got a couple of SCO boxes, running old, but essential, console applications written in Microfocus Cobol.

    For the past few months I've been looking at replacing them with Linux machines - there's no way I'd be looking at upgrading the SCO OS.

    Whilst SCO OpenServer 5.0 isn't amazing it has been reasonably stable. The tools available are all outdated, and reasonably cryptic. Augmenting them with the addition of lots of GNU stuff from Skunkworks makes using the machines bearable - but many things just aren't available. (eg. Working legato backup clients.)

    The biggest problem with SCO installations I have, in remote offices, is the lack of hardware support. Many many common, or cheap, pieces of hardware just aren't supported.

    Since Microfocus Cobol runtimes exist, or used to exist, for Linux I'm thinking the pragmatic thing to do is just migrate. It won't be free, but it will ease support in the future - both in terms of hardware support and general reliability.

    Sometimes I've come into work to find a SCO kernel panic with no obvious explaination. They also degrade significantly under load, despite best efforts at tuning. (However this could be the hardware, or the application itself - hard to tell).

    I find it hard to believe the SCO will attract significant new customers - perhaps some customers will upgrade to keep their vertical applications, or sourceless code, running. But they've managed to either alienate or upset their clueful client-base.

    SCO doesn't really have a future right now, as far as I'm concerned.

  2. Is this even legal??? by codergeek42 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Section 4 of the GNU General Public License states (emphasis added):
    4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
    So since SCO have questionably violated the GPL with the Linux kernel, aren't they not allowed to distribute the GPL-licensed components like KDE and MySQL with their product?
  3. Um...yea. by HaeMaker · · Score: 4, Informative
    OpenServer administrators will be pleased to see that Version 6 supports dynamically loading kernel modules. Previously, basic operations in OpenServer, such as changing the IP address of an Ethernet device, required kernel relinking and a reboot--an inconvenience that's no longer required.
    No comment.
  4. Are they allowed to include those components? by hazee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My memory may be going, but I seem to dimly recall that after this whole SCO fiasco erupted, a number of open-source projects put terms in their licenses that explicity forbid SCO from including them into any future SCO offerings.

    Anyone else recall this? If so, wouldn't it be fun if it turns out that SCO's latest offering is illegally incorporating code it has no right to...

    1. Re:Are they allowed to include those components? by rl117 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Licences explicitly forbidding SCO to include and redistribute them would no longer be free according to our OSI and DFSG guidelines. We might not like them using our code, but that's one of the freedoms we have granted our users, and to restrict that would take away that freedom, and would mean that GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian could no longer redistribute it.

      http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

      5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

      The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

      and

      http://www.debian.org/social_contract

      5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

      The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

      6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

      The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.