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SCO to Unix developers, We want you back
NoGuffCheck writes "CRN is reporting that Darl McBride is looking to get Unix developers back onboard with cash incentives for completing training in SCO's new mobile application kit; EdgeBuilder. It doesn't stop there; there's a 12-cylinder BMW or $100,000 dollars for the development of the best wireless application."
It is inevitable that there will be a shareholder lawsuit as SCO makes its final circles around the drain before bankruptcy or liquidation. Darth Darl needs to make it look like he made his best effort at keeping the company afloat to have a chance of keeping all of his money.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
This is why their former customers are not going to be future customers, unless they're badly locked in on some 3rd party software. And non-customers will never become customers. Who wants to do business with somebody who'll sue you for moving to a competitor's product? It's like getting divorced from a gold-digger.
This is not my sandwich.
Sounds like a versio of the prisoners dilemma http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma /
Except in theis case it's developers avoiding working for SCO. But the less who do, the better the chances for someone else to get the prize. So there's an incentive to break ranks. Maybe be the one and only developer.
Think of it as a lottery with your integrity against winning a fast car.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Hmmm... on a completely cough random topic, I think I might switch from MySQL to Postgres.
HP, I could care less about (their computers are cheap, and their calculators are nothing like they used to be), but I thought that MySQL had a decent set of morals. The fact that they could maintain enterprise support while still offering an open-source version is an indication of that. (Although I believe some of the MySQL products are available only to enterprise customers, which is evil.)
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Not surprising at all... SCO is now like VRML, a technology that was always looking for a purpose, rather than technology trying to solve a purpose. It almost reminds you of this company in the year 2k in SF, Istorage I want to say? The original business model was to provide 25MB of FREE storage space that you could access anytime! BY 2002, they had become a design studio or something.
Companies have to keep rolling, so the executives can keep the money and options going.
and they can't wait for their apps to make the move to Linux. One customer - and this is an end user - is talking openly about the "end of SCO". Another moved to an application running on an IBM i5 (the modern version of the AS400). If there is any cost involved to an upgrade or a fix, SCO customers often just move on to another platform. There is now an entire mini-industry involved in converting data on SCO servers to some other server.
Besides, even the latest versions of SCO/unix seriously suck. We swapped out a tape drive in one and it took days to get it running and required lots of phone time. Until I started on this project I had forgotten how difficult Linux was in 1993; that's where SCO is now.
Plus no bash shell. No up-arrow command scrolling. Arggh!
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
HP, I could care less about (their computers are cheap, and their calculators are nothing like they used to be), but I thought that MySQL had a decent set of morals. The fact that they could maintain enterprise support while still offering an open-source version is an indication of that.
I'm confused by this post. I just have to ask you to clarify...
Are you saying that MySQL is immoral/evil because they *gasp* charge for some things they invest time and money to develop, or is my sarcasm meter broken?
No, I think he means mysql is evil because they are sponsoring SCO's disgusting attempt to buy their way out of the history books and back into mainstream corporate and technology circles. I happen to agree...MySQL is more evil than companies like HP et.al. for the very reason he cited: they are in the free software community, they know the issues, and they certainly cannot be ignorant of how Darl McBride and SCO tried to steal GNU/Linux from its creators (yes, steal, because if McBride et.al. had succeeded in their fraud, the creators of the Linux kernel, and perhaps the wider GNU community, would have been denied the right to legally use their own creations), and they've chosen to sponsor this despite that knowledge. At least a big company like HP may not have followed this (all the SCO bruhaha could be beneath their radar).
I agree that sponsoring an evil knowing its full implications is an act of greater maliciousness than sponsoring an evil in ignorance of its full implications, and MySQL certainly appears to fall in the former category.
It's a pity...I actually like their product. Time to give postgres a gander I suppose.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
You are absolutely right. I worked on SCO systems as a contractor for TACO BELL for a few years programming and maintaining their back of house software used on PC's in the store. They had an effort to create a windows based in-store system, but that has been abandoned. Now, they are porting their back of house applications to SUSE Linux with a view to getting off of SCO systems as soon as they can. The same is true, I believe for their fellow Yum brands company, Pizza Hut.
This latest move by SCO is desperation -- trying to find some new market in which to stay alive while their bread and butter UnixWare and OpenServer business withers and dies. SCO is going down.
OpenServer (at least v5.0.5 which I have) is weird. It's better documented than Linux is and can ever hope to be - the docs are more consistent, more accurate, more complete, and better written. It's also incredibly stable in most ways - but with a few REALLY annoying quirks. As it's also stable in the same way a fossil is (What, buy and upgrade? Get bent), that's frustrating. It also has some incredibly annoying limitations, a set of developer tools so bad they boggle the mind (and the alternatives aren't great either - haven't got Skunkware's gcc WORKING yet), and some basic services we're used to just being there ... well ... aren't. Oh, and printing on SCO is one of the worst messes I've ever had the misfortune to work with - it makes Linux printing look like heaven, and it's pretty awful too. If you now feel the need to scour your eyes with steel wool, you're not alone.
... and there's always Solaris as an alternative.
... but with a free Solaris, they're just doomed. RHEL and so on help a fair bit with regards to stability in Linux too - something which also doesn't help SCO in the slightest.
I maintain an OpenServer box for work only because of a legacy app that requires it. Well, strictly, the app requires Microsoft Xenix to run - it's from 1983 (!!) - but SCO OpenServer's XENIX kernel personality does the trick with a few quirks. OpenServer at least supports PCI, >16MB RAM, and >512MB disks, unlike XENIX. (OpenServer 5.0.5 actually supports up to 2TB disks/arrays, >137GB ATA disks, etc. Not bad for an OS from 1995). If it weren't for that need - which Linux can't satisfy even with the defunct ibcs project - I'd be rid of OpenServer in an instant. Linux 2.6 isn't as stable as I'd like, but that's worth it
I can't imagine anybody buying OpenServer now. Its only purpose is legacy support. Unixware doesn't even have that. Before Sun released Solaris for free, they had a tiny sliver of hope from people who need more stability than Linux provides
Even if their technology wasn't obsolete crap, who on earth would buy from a company that sues its own customers? Oh, wait, I use Microsoft software at work and I'm well aware of its involvement in the BSA & BSAA so that's no argument at all... but the obsolete crap point holds.
SCO criticism is mostly all valid, but this is just wrong. SCOX has been holding steady at ~4.20 for months and months - it's all insiders peddling tiny volume. It was in freefall, oh, a couple of years ago, but it's stable now and it ain't going anywhere.= m&q=l&c=
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=5y&l=off&z