SCO Offers Up The 'SCAMP' Stack

Robert wrote to mention a Computer Business Review Online article about SCO's newest marketing tactic. They're offering their OS as part of a 'SCAMP' stack, ala the more familiar LAMP setup. From the article: "The Lindon, Utah-based Unix vendor has included the open source Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP and Perl programming languages with its SCO OpenServer operating system since the launch of OpenServer 6 in June 2005. It is now pitching the technologies as a SCAMP stack, placing it squarely up against the Linux-based LAMP stack. SCO claims that Linux contains Unix code donated to the open source operating system in violation of agreements between it and IBM Corp."

Comments

Not safe to use

[Guspaz]

It isn't safe to use SCAMP. SCO's corporate future is uncertain. They've based their entire company around a lawsuit that it looks like they will probably lose. It would be a bad idea to use SCAMP for a production system only to have SCO go bankrupt a year or two later.

Sure, you could convert your SCAMP-based application to LAMP if that happens, but doing that on a production system is very costly due to all the manpower to switch platforms and all the testing to make sure everything works.

You should ask yourself, what advantages does SCAMP offer over LAMP that warrants the risk of using a platform from a dying company? Are there even any such advantages at all?

Re:Not safe to use

[dougmc]

It would be a bad idea to use SCAMP for a production system only to have SCO go bankrupt a year or two later.

I wouldn't say that.

SCAMP is short on details, but it sounds like it's exactly the same tools as in LAMP ... but in SCO. Except that you could just drop your application back into Linux, and it would just work there too. You could also move it to FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenBSD ... probably even Windows (most of the LAMP stuff runs under cygwin at least, and there's probably native Windows versions of most of it) and it would even work there with minimal work.

I don't see much danger here. (Of course, I don't see much benefit in going with SCO in the first place, and so I certainly wouldn't do so.)

As far as I can tell, it's just a marketing ploy. `Look! We can do the same thing as Linux, but we have a cuter name for it! So use us!'. There's little danger, as your application would probably port right back to a LAMP system with little effort, but there's no benefit either, because a LAMP system would work just as well from the beginning.

Re:What really caught my eye here:

[DavidTC]

Why the hell would anyone buy a webserver restricted to five users?

Especially considering that some browsers will open two connections to load a page, and most will keep the connection open for a second or so just in case it needs to make more requests. If there are dialup users where each page load takes five seconds, and opens two connections, and users click about once every twenty seconds...you need ten people to render the website unusable, on average. (It can handle less dialup people than normal people, to show how silly this is.)

Does anyone recall when the supposed 'advantage' (The only advantage) of Unix over Linux was that Unix scaled better? Does SCO releasing extremely crippled versions of Unix really help this concept?

And, yes, it appears they are licensing the stack in addition to the OS, which makes no sense, because if you purchase their Unix, you can frickin go and download MySQL, Apache, and PHP/Perl/Python/whatever yourself.