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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."
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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?
Somewhere in the dank basement levels far below Darl McBride's office, SCO's only remaining systems engineer is laughing wildly. They actually went with "SCAMP"! The fools!
LAMP isn't so much a literal acronym as much as is stands for the concept of all the components being open source. I doubt many people would stop calling it LAMP if it included FreeBSD instead of Linux, nor would replacing MySQL with ProgreSQL suddenly turn it into something completely different. Hell, the P can mean PHP, Perl or Python, and I think even Ruby would count as a LAMP language.
So how this SCAMP thing is supposed to be anything special, is completely beyond my comprehention.
However, I for one would be VERY curious as to how SCO is treating all the different FOSS licenses which apply. As far as I know, Apache's license has a mutual patent annihilation clause, and I'm pretty sure the other licenses have their own set of rules too. It would be all too funny if one of them found a reason to sue SCO over their prepackaged SCAMP solution.
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Have they become so lawsuit happy that they've forgotten how to compete?
Yes, actually. As soon as Caldera took over the SCO Unix business, they pretty much dropped any real support for the platform and focused their efforts on sueing Linux. If the reports are to be believed, their distributors were about ready to hang them during the various regional meetings. The SCO corporate reps came across as somewhat anxious about all the bad will towards them, but definitely not apologetic.
The fallout of these meetings was expected to be that SCO would lose a lot of their local distributors. The results of which would be catastrophic if SCO were actually trying to do business. Now that they realize that their lawsuit has failed, they've found that they've screwed themselves on being able to do business. In addition, they've burned their OSS bridge (guess we won't be seeing an opensco.org, eh?), leaving them with no real edge in the market. So now they're trying to convince businesses that they can provide OSS support without being an OSS supporter.
My prediction? You're going to be seeing quite a few new Solaris 10/OpenSolaris installations very soon now.
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And if they replace the PHP package with Tcl, they can call it SCAT.