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SCO CEO Calls Red Hat a Fraud

Posted by Hemos on from the no-you-have-to-pay-for-iot dept.

James Morris writes "A story at Newswire reports that SCO CEO Doug Michels considers Red Hat selling Linux to be 'a Fraud' because it was developed freely. Sounds like he forgot his medication again. " I suppose it's an interesting point-but I think the angle SCO takes is a probably a wee bit different.

2 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Memoirs of ANOTHER former SCO developer by Eric+Green · · Score: 5

    My employer at the time made the transition in spring of 1996. SCO had discontinued Xenix by then, and our customers were VERY unhappy about the thought of paying massive per-user fees when we upgraded their old Xenix servers (Xenix was unlimited user). I tried running our database engine under iBCS2 on Linux and guess what? It actually ran FASTER than on SCO Unix!

    When the bid season started, my boss looked at the per-user charges for Linux, looked at the per-user charges for SCO Unix, asked me what the downside was, and all I could do was shrug and say "I don't know, I've been doing my development under Linux for the last three months and then porting it to SCO, everything seems to work right and work faster."

    One trial school district later, and it was official: Linux was more stable and more feature-ful than SCO Unix, and ran like a scalded cat even on lowly IDE drives (SCO Unix runs like a bored tortoise on IDE). Porting our SCO Unix application to Linux was basically a case of re-compiling and fixing some minor printer issues in our code (since Linux uses the BSD print spooler while SCO uses the Sys V print spooler).

    Y2K hurried the move to Linux too, since all the older SCO boxes had Y2K issues.

    I know for a fact that SCO lost over $250,000 in sales from that single move to Linux. Multiply that by every other SCO VAR that is looking at Linux or has switched to Linux, and you can only conclude that SCO would have at least twice the revenue that they have today, if not for Linux.

    -- Eric

    --
    Send mail here if you want to reach me.
  2. Memoirs of a former SCO developer. by Fish+Man · · Score: 5

    In 1994, I was programming SCO systems at work, we were an SCO shop.

    Early in 1994, I read an article stating that Linux 1.0 had been released, the first "stable" release.

    I had heard little things about Linux, and decided that it was time I checked it out.

    I got myself a Slackware distribution and installed it on my home PC.

    Having been the veteran of already 5 or 6 SCO installs at the time, my first impression was of how simple the install was. I had a working system in a half hour or so. I was particularly impressed with the fact that this thing had installed from my proprietary interface Mitsumi CDROM drive, all the commercial UNIX's at the time required a SCSI CDROM. I had PPP and X working after a couple of evenings of fiddling with the system. Much easier than SCO and most impressive!

    Remember, this was 1994. After a little experience with my home Linux box, it became apparent to me that there was NOTHING we were doing at work with SCO that we couldn't also do with Linux. We would have to replace some commercial apps we were using with SCO with freeware equivalents, but clearly the functionality was there.

    I floated a few trial balloons at work about migrating from SCO to Linux. I work for a pretty good employer, they were met with some interest.

    The first Linux box we set up at work was a little server built out of discarded parts for the purpose of letting SCO developers run Netscape Navigator on their desktops. You see, in 1994 and 1995, there was still not a port of Netscape to SCO. We ran Navigator on the Linux box and displayed the display on the SCO desktop, it worked great, we called this machine our "Netscape Server", even though, of course, it was not running the software, "Netscape Server", but was "serving" netscape client sessions to the SCO developers!

    Long story short: by early 1996 we had migrated completely from SCO to Linux for our application (a factory automation system) and there's been no looking back.

    SCO is the least stable, least intuitive, hardest to configure, hardest to scale, crashingest, and buggiest of the commercial UNIX distributions. Linux kicked its but in 1993 and does so even more today.

    Mr. Michels' comments are transparently the remarks of a CEO who's company is in it's death throws and needs a scapegoat to blame.

    But, they truly have no one to blame for their situation but themselves.