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SCO's Michels Blasts 'Punk Kids' Linux
assimilated writes "In the April 26th issue of Computerworld, president and CEO of SCO made a few well-put comments about the Linux "religion". I think he was right on. A legitimate vendor speaks out...
Read the article to get fussy. " Hehe-I had no idea I was working for the Catholic Church. Does that mean I can't get married after all?
How bout some INFO under headlines
Reading the article I could do nothing but think
about some of the flame wars if seen so far on the internet, its almost all bashing and there is little fact or usefull info in it.
Or am I wrong?
I loved UnixWare. At my place of employeement we had the main server on UnixWare 2.01. That ran fine until the SCSI controller went nuts. At that point we droped it in favor of a p2 running FreeBSD (old server was a DEC Prioris XL). So in a sense you could say we liked Novell's UnixWare as we stayed away from SCO's UnixWare (2.1/7.0) because of their pricing structure for user liceneses. I still prefer UnixWare over Linux. But then again I also still use Ultrix.
As for SCO not including the TCP/IP subset you have to remember SCO made their money in POS/retail market. OpenServer was meant to have many many terminals connected to it, not do web serving. Thats why they (SCO) pruchased UnixWare. They need a decent TCP/IP implmentation.
While the guy might have been right in some aspects, it was obvious that he hasn't paid too close attention to Linux. It seems like instead of doing solid research, he's blasting Linux from what he's heard from colleagues. And of course, I thought everyone knew that Linus is from Finland...
We all know beowulf kicks butt. What I think people are talking about when they say 'not scalable' is SMP. Supposedly, much of the kernel code is not re-entrant. However, this is only rumor I don't know it from first-hand experience.
you would restrict information, even if it's true?
how low the linux movement has fallen.
which Linux does well anyway.
Besides, that is having projected computing power and the actual I/O to sustain it is two different things.
May I'm wrong but I thought some punk kids 20 years ago created some wacky operating system called BSD? Did some wacky kids also create some protocol stack called ...TCP? Isn't this the technology that SCO is built on? I think it's funny to watch a company in its death thralls. Next we'll hear Mikey boy spouting about how sco is better because Linus obviously is working for the KGB through Finnish contacts and linux is actually another communist plot to take over the world... get off it, you had your time, you squandered your market share and sat on your duffs (ala mac) while the industry grew up and grew on. And as for the testing part, the real world is the best test platform you will ever find.
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought some punk kids 20 years ago created some wacky operating system called BSD? Didn't some wacky kids also create some protocol stack called ...TCP? Isn't this the technology that SCO is built on? I think it's funny to watch a company in its death thralls. Next we'll hear Mikey boy spouting about how sco is better because Linus obviously is working for the KGB through Finnish contacts and linux is actually another communist plot to take over the world... get off it, you had your time, you squandered your market share and sat on your duffs (ala mac)...(at least mac has realized this and are working to remedy this situation. while the industry grew up and grew on. And as for the testing part, the real world is the best test platform you will ever find.
if you go to their web site and look at a chart of .it started trending downward
their stock price. .
about 1st quarter 95. My guess is this guy's in
the hot seat because of the stock price.
Even worse, the old argument to the board of
directors ("the Unix market is dying") just doesn't
work anymore with Linux and BSD* marketshare
rapidly increasing marketshare.
--Brad
Because every SINGLE person who I've ever talked of or heard of has HATED SCO and has, upon trying Linux, said that Linux is infinitely superior and that they're NEVER going back.
Every other OS I've ever run across has had its fanhood. Sure a lot of us say AIX blows, but some people out there will stand up and say it's got its fine points. Sure a lot of us say NT blows but some people out there also rabidly support it. I have never met ANYONE who has liked SCO.
The facts of the matter are thus:
* SCO has the look and feel of a toy OS. The original designers KNEW that UNIX on a PC was never going to be more than a toy and it shows.
* SCO's pricing plan is both confusing and annoying. Every company I've ever heard from (Including the one where I was making the buying decisions) quickly gets disgusted. If we'd had Linux back when my choices were SCO or DOS, my company would have gone the Linux route and never looked back (We went the DOS route.)
* I've never heard one good thing or had one good experience with SCO's technical support.
We should all view SCO UNIX as what it truly is: A failed MS attempt to try UNIX on Intel PC's.
It's interesting that you never see BSDI people
bitch and moan about any of the freely available
Unix variants.
They may do it in private, but they probably
realize saying something in public doesn't help
at all. If nothing else, they know such public
idiocies wouldn't help them in recruiting tech
savvy employees.
--AC
Really? SCO was the first experience for me.
As far as I can remember it rocked. I learned to
program in C and all that. Then came Linux. It
seemed so ugly, but when I saw coloured ls - I
realised it was better than SCO. Although the gcc
was not awfully great.
IMHO SCO is one of the finest OS'es around (after Linux of course;)
Michels is UNIX's posterboy for sour grapes. I'd be glad to hear some words of wisdom about the inexpensive hardware-based unix world. But sofar its been less wisdom and more cranky-old-man ranting.
Until this changes, I would suggest articles involving him get a different graphic. I'd think the comedy/foot would be much more appropriate.
Of course, you'll notice this kind of thing is happening more often; bash linux, get a headline. Perhapse its time for a new news catagory? One that involves a little picture of a troll.
But it's not GNU. Hail Eris!
...SCO didn't get the Burlington Coat Factory contract (an as a result he won't be able to buy that new sailing yatch he had his eye on).
Honestly, though, I do think that Linux has the remarkable ability to push enterprise implementation decisions down into the hands of the truely competent and out of the grubby middle manager and big wheels at the top of some corporate machine that live off of the knowledge energy gradient created by the techs. in the trenches. In fact, I think this is the single most important reason that the OSS model works. It's not a matter or religion or scratching an itch; it is an effective way creativly release those FTPHB (fsck the pointy haired boss) feelings and get something quite positive out of it at the same time. This is what Bill Gate, Larry Ellison and the SCO guy just don't get and never will.
SCO has a lot of embedded systems in corporate and retail sectors. It's in the top 10 with NT, Solaris, NetWare, QNX and others. SCO will continue to derive significant income based on the legacy presence for quite a long while (the main reason that NetWare is still alive).
I think what scares the HELL out SCO is that most enterprise solutions involving SCO revolve around a fair amount of code developed in-house at the particular companies that use SCO. Code that could easily be ported to Linux. Other OS vendors don't have this particular nighmare to fear.
If I were a Linux consultant (hey, wait... I am a Linux consultant!), I would go a'courten' companies with large SCO deployments. It would take me about 30 seconds to explain to company X, entrenched heavily in SCO, how they could probably save enough money annually to triple their IT budget (and still afford to pay me and my fellow Linux consultants a hefty chest of booty).
Maybe this is all part of some big Microsoft conspiracy to finally kill off SCO (remember Bill would still have linux under his wing too, if some things had gone a little differntly in the past). Then again, maybe it's not... who cares... we already know which OS will win in the end... and the name doesn't end in "Inc.", "Corp." or "Ltd."
I'm not god of a sysadmin, but here are my experiences. I used Linux as a webserver/file server before I ever tried SCO, so I was a little biased before I ever tried it.
SCO does have its applications, and for some reason people want to use it. I won't go as far as comparing it to other versions of UNIX because I've never used them.
I can't believe this guy went as far as badmouthing linux. Badmouthing is unprofessional, perhaps he should go read the Linux Advocacy FAQ and learn a thing or two.
simon
The proof of Linux' commercial viability is clear. Folks like Red Hat and Linux Care providing a range of service options including 24/7 service. IBM, Oracle, Corel and a number of other vendors picking up Linux as a strategic OS. Just as clear is that the head of SCO seems very worried. SCO is not positioned to take advantage of the market the way Linux is at this point.
People such as this gentleman who find it necessary to diss the professionality of the Linux community are clearly not getting the message---or maybe they're getting it a bit too strongly....
Rob L., nick password for 'blocked' not handy
The proof of Linux' commercial viability is clear. Folks like Red Hat and Linux Care providing a range of service options including 24/7 service. IBM, Oracle, Corel and a number of other vendors picking up Linux as a strategic OS. Just as clear is that the head of SCO seems very worried. SCO is not positioned to take advantage of the market the way Linux is at this point.
People such as this gentleman who find it necessary to diss the professionality of the Linux community are clearly not getting the message---or maybe they're getting it a bit too strongly....
Rob L., nick password for 'blocked' not handy
...and has been sleeping through the 90s. Perhaps Mr. Michels, you should drop by your local university and see about signing up for an intro to business or PR class. Atacking a vocal grass roots movememt (not to me confused with Astroterf(TM)) in the media with insults is not the way to "win friends and influence people".
Besides, who are YOU to criticize?? Your company has been pretty sick over the past five years. Just check Yahoo's stock charts on SCOC. A rising tide is supposed to lift all boats, and the "internet tidalwave" should have moved SCO up over the past five years. Were ya on the beach at the time Mr. Michels? Couldn't figure out how to make money off of that 'Internet' thing that was BUILT ON UNIX?? SCO's stock has tanked nicely in that time frame. I'm sure your anual bonus reflects this.
Tell ya what Mr. Michels; Me and the other 'Punk Kids' will see if we can get Linux Mall to add the item called "Purchase a share of SCO - $5". Perhaps with enough donations... er.. I mean "stock purchases" you can figure out how to get into this neat new 'Internet' thing you've been hearing so much about.
But if you look at SCO's last quarterly report they brought in record revenue.
Stock price is nonsense, based mostly on public image. (Fergoshsakes, look at Micro$oft's stock price! Don't tell me it's a sign of their superior technology!) SCO has a history of lousy PR, and a lot of it is due to Michels being a pompous bastard -- that's nothing new. But they're still the mostly widely used commercial UNIX in the world, even with Linux eating out their market.
The engineer. An end user who is having trouble
getting Linux to work is more likely to simply
give up and run back to Microsoft.
He's not trying to stop the luser from posting drivel, just commenting where it rightfully belongs. What part of "should" don't you understand?
Translation: "If AIX ran at all on our hardware, it'd work really well." Uh . . . keen.
In public? While speaking for his employer?!
Is there something in the water around Santa Cruz?
It's true that we don't test very methodically, and probably repeat a lot of effort (much like development - the interesting and popular stuff gets the most attention). But unless SCO's QA staff are unusually competent (and by all these accounts, SCO Unix is actually below average, if that's even possible), users probably still come out way ahead.
This is one of the things the masses just Don't Get about Free Software. It's immortal. There's no PHB to decide they'd rather sell you something new, so if you wanted to buy something old you're just screwed. It may not be getting maintained decades from now, but if you don't like what the geeks may have moved on to, you'll still be able to get the most recent Linux, and even convince someone (money talks) to update it if you want.
Clearly, SCO is seeing that its own existance isn't justified, so it's trying its hardest to give users a reason to think they are worth looking at.
Put simply, SCO is obsolete, and so is proprietary software. He's clearly either stupid, ignorant, or a liar - probably all of them. The multiprocessor support in SCO is light years behind Linux and he knows it. Linux is taking innovative technologies (GGI? Looked in the "networking section" recently?) and incorporating, while using what's reliable from SCO.
SCO is a value-subtracted vendor. They take something decent - like Unix - and detract from it with horrible licensing. Where did he get off talking about "Norway" (where did that place come from?) boy and his licensing, while SCO is a perfect example of a license designed to hurt the user.
Down with SCO. I used to respect them as a vendor of a moderatly decent Unix. No added value, no, but a Unix vendor. Now they are down there with Microsoft in my book.
"Punk" is, of course, prison slang for a regular rape victim.
The two aspects to get excited about are that it's Free Software and Anything-but-Microsoft. Otherwise it's just a kernel that doesn't suck much.
If I were Michaels, I'd cry too!
Here's a prime example of the "nerd" mentality....
"Punk kids" do not an industry make. Linux kids who are angry because THEY'RE not Bill Gates or who love Linux for the sake of it being an underdog do NOT influence decision makers in corporations. Linux fanatics are absolutely kidding themsleves if they think that Fortune 500 companies hire raving Linux fanatics. Hey kids, get your nose out of your damn computer and wake up to the real world!
It's so funny. Every time I watch the Simpsons, I see the comic-book guy. The 43 year old virgin with the ponytail who thinks that he knows all. I'm sure he catalogs his comic books with Linux.
Oh God. The will the close-minded cluelessness never end? Are any of you kids here professionals? Any of you get paid to work with Linux? Get a clue, please.
the popularity of Linux has seriously reduced the amount of cash he has coming in with which to buy drugs. We all no addicts will do or say ANYTHING to get their fix...
But seriously, I've always known Michels was an asshole; so was his dad. I've never known a company more deserving of bankruptcy. That being said, is it possible that some of his comments about the weaknesses of Linux (e.g. scalability) have some merit?
Is it any coincidence that "Linux" rhymnes with "Sucks"...?
I guess you are right a bit. Just some nostalgy ;) It has been 4 years since
kicking in.
SCO really was one of the most difficult OS'es you
could port things on. But that is the way I
learned to hack, to change the code, to understand
the code.
Things got a lot better when someone managed
to compile gcc
I droped SCO...
SCO in itself was really cool IMHO.
Being religious is a basic human right. If Linux is a religion, then surely 'Windows Everywhere' and 'Java Everywhere' corporate agendas imply an infringement of religious freedom... Anyone care for a jihad ;-O
Interestingly enough, in a last job we ran a quake server on a SCO machine with Linux compatibility.
To us it did not matter. We needed SCO because of the hardware we were using, and the availability of the quake server in binary format was fine. A Linux box did not have hardware compatibility with the propietary compaq hardware we were using.
Oh, incidently, we did eventually install a Linux box, but for completely different reasons. It crashed often. This was way back in early 2.x (afaik a supposedly stable version).
Two problems they will encounter if they break an OSS license:
1. Their fork will quickly fall behind the mainstream. Merging fixes eventually becomes a nightmare.
2. Their employees (who know about it) get them over a barrel... think about it!
Well we all know the results of "millions of dollars" of testing, don't we? Now how much was it that Microsoft paid Mindcraft....?!
:)
Can't say I particularly like SCO either - I rememebr it as a bit of a nightmare. Pevious to that I'd developed on HP-UX8 and 9. SCO (and the Olivetti hardware) were dredful in comparison.
It was a relief to escape to Windows NT4. Linux and Solaris have followed, thankfully.....
er...Linux is an industry..call the "punk kids" what you want...
:)
This is sad. SCO be saved by totally embracing linux? put the pipe down. The only thing that would benefit from SCO embracing linux would be linux. SCO makes a lot of money selling their OS, what do you think would happen to their business if they suddenly had to sell linux at 50 bux a pop? I realize that you would really like to see all major unix manufacturers totally embrace linux, but don't hold your breath. It won't help them, only you and the rest of the community.
System V is an "aging code base"? SCO's kernel kicks ass over Linux. It's reentrant, much better tuned, scales better than anything else on x86... It's their greatest strength.
A better solution would be to keep the SCO kernel and replace the aging (and under-maintained) utilities with GNU utils. Or at least open-source their existing utils so that those of us who have to use them can fix them when they break.
If you look at all the people complaining about how much SCO sucks, 99% of the time, they're complaining about UI issues, not the OS itself.
What with that? I thought AT&T/Bell Labs/Lucent owned it?
I wouldn't mind seeing some very large scale
tests though.. ie. Dell or IBM doing tests of
their own hardware running linux.. or even
something at a Linux convention/conference.
ie. several hundred computers brought by the
attendees as the clients.
you're an idiot. that was him being facetious. it's a belittling joke. that takes brain power man....
Uh, NT does not fork, it only threads :)
I believe this is Linus' response to the extremely large memory question.
Linux runs on Alpha (and does so very well), and ports to UltraSPARC, PA-RISC and MIPS are forthcoming; why limit your scope to 32-bit i386 or PPC?
~AC
Did anyone bother to notice at Linux world in San ,yep you guessed it .Sco!
Jose,who gave away the hardest to configure software
SCO=Silicon valley Cast Outs.
Stay in santa Cruz with the rest of the ignorant morons.
Ummm, check the stock prices. SCO does NOT make lots of money doing this...or if they do, it's not going to the stockholders.
The suits are nervous. GOOD!
15% of SCO is owned by Microsoft. You figure it out.
SCO are angling to position themselves above RedHat in the low-to-middle (i.e. not SUN/HP/IBM) Unix marketplace.
Previously, they've tried to be POS boxes, network machines, internet servers, e-mail servers, remote access devices, you name it.
Once there was a point to SCO, it was cheaper than a DEC VAX and more connective than a mainframe. Now, though...except for (overpriced) proprietary hardware (Compaq is in its' own trouble...) Linux will blow SCO out of the water.
Isn't Microsoft part owner of SCO?
I find it somewhat ironic that on one hand the Linux community claims that Linux users happily put up with broken software in the name of on-line testing, but on the other hand claim that Window NT is inferior because it is full of bugs. What's wrong with bugs then?
At least with most Linux bugs we can _theoretically_ debug it ourselves. You'd have to wait for a service pack to fix an NT bug.
I maintain several Sco Boxes for as part of my job. I'd say linux is easier to use, equally stable, on multiprocessor machines no less. I can see paying megabucks to run Solaris on a Sparc machine, but if I'm going to go x86 in the future, why pay mega bucks for something less functional ? Hell SCO used to charge for TCP/IP licenses !
I've worked on the following unices as a developer/administrator - SCO, Digital Unix, Solaris, AIX, Linux, BSD. SCO isn't even on the map. It's piss weak. In the small end of town you'd be nut to even think about anything other than Linux or BSD (don't even think about solaris x86). The market knows this, SCO aren't getting new customers. They'll be gone soon.
IMHO multiprocessing is absolutely the wrong tradeoff right now. Our busses are generally too slow for *single* processors, and that's without any contention other than device I/O. Meanwhile, clustering is dirt cheap and easy to scale.
That was simply my interpretation of "well tuned for the specific hardware" and "more hardware to support". IOW anyone who buys a combination of proprietary hardware and software that can't live without each other deserves what they get, namely screwed. Meanwhile competition makes my commodity hardware ever better and cheaper.
Maybe a turn-key VAR (I'm guessing the alley doesn't have a sysadmin) bought licenses in bulk, and is still doling out the last of them?
Anytime you hear a corporation say that it takes too much time, money, and know-how to do something right, implying they are unique, think about the fact that every company in existence is the spawning of some entrepreneur.
All I know is that I've envied punks all my life because only a punk will do what they want to and continue to believe in it contrary to the eyes of the establishment.
I know that my worth to companies in the future will be determined by how well I know linux. Finally, I'll have the freedom to do things without having to climb over artificially erected barriers like buying a compiler for $100 on a $0.25/week allowance.
Just because you own some paper doesn't mean that you are worth something.
Get a clue, or risk being called a jerk by some punk.
Linux didn't break any new ground...but it's nice, elegant and small, easy to understand. So now we've got some punk young kids who've taken and engineered pieces around the Unix [kernel]
i get annoyed at this. l*nux is for ever showing new bit's of new software useful or otherwise, it runs on many different types of hardware, it's demands for resources are few...it's adaptable and has the ability to be modified...the dna or source code of linux can be modified as required.
I don't understand why you get annoyed by that, it's true for gods sake.
Linux is nothing innovative, it's just another un*x clone except it got fanatic followers.
But it doesn't remove the fact that SCO UNIX suck bigtime.
Second, Linux products are not particularly scalable and don't handle multiprocessors well.
dont know about this, can anyone comment?
It's true, Linux stinks att SMP.
I can see it now: Linus as televangelist on Sunday mornings, healing PC's with the 'Power Of Linux'. Donations pouring in while the choir belts out the 'Free Software Song'. Maybe even speaking in tongues (ix86 assembly?). Instead of the Crystal Cathedral it could be in the Crystal Bazaar. It'd be great!
I agree. i just hate these linux fanatics.. indeed twas became a religion.. once u become a linux kid u must hate bill gates because he is the devil! hehehe. grow up punks. i like linus ideas and linux. but stop the flaming and blabbering against other os's coz it isnt any better than those commercial stuff.
I was relieved from SCO back in 91,
suffering from many shortcomings like
14 character limit and slow file system,
Microsoft C-6.0 with a limit of 2MB
executable size (I think the limit was
somewhere in the translator to the COFF format)
32 character symbols, plenty of security holes,
at a time when all other un*x operting systems
have been far more superiour.
I've come to like linux and don't feel absolutely
no need to switch back to that painful
experience with SCO.
Actually....
Unix (tm) is a little corporate whore who has been tossed between so many corporate pimps that she forgot how to count.
No... NetWare is a pathetic mess that is rapidly lagging behind the state of the art...
Remember... never fall in love with your OS; instead, make it better.
Can't do that with SCO/NetWare/NT/QNX/et. al.
Let the old fart have his day. Sure, SCO still
is very much in the business of selling UNIX
for PCs, but ask yourself: how long do you
really think there'll be a need for SCO?
My prediction is that within 5 years Linux and
FreeBSD have surpassed every commercial UNIX for
PCs with regard to hardware support, performance,
scalability etc.
SCO is dead. They know that they already have
severe problems competing with Linux and they
know they will loose in the long run. Let the
old fart have his day. In the long run they
will probably adopt the Linux kernel themselves.
"I'm sure he catalogs his comic books with Linux."
Damn straight!!
He used to use Open Server, back in seasons 2 and 3. But ever since Oracle and Informix ported to Linux, he's been running Debian.
Meanwhile, Lisa is writing ALSA drivers; Mrs. Crabapple runs a local ISP and just opened up an auction site; Flanders is working on a Christian-friendly distribution; and Mr. Bruns is down for $6 mm in the next round of Red Hat financing.
Cheer up. I'm sure Homer still uses Unixware at work.
Gotta run -- Milhous@penguincomputing.com just sent me some more 8-way Profusion patches to check out. Damn that kid is hot.
Umm, Zico, if you knew the background on that then answer these.
Why SCO continued to support those Microsoft code segments for so long?
Why SCO took Microsoft to court in Europe, out of the U.S. media's scope? (the venue was chosen deliberately, SCO admitted that)
No, Sun has just realized that the war isn't fought in the press, it's in the minds of the suits, and the end users. Hence the whole "dot in dot com" ad campaign, they're trying to get people to think of Sun rather than MicroSux as their next big server.
The theory is, Linux at the workstation, Sun (or HP/UX or AIX) on the big box in the back room. Linux is more compatible to Solaris than Windows...therefore don't slam it lest its' adherents turn on you!
Really. And here I'd bought SCO's story that the code was part of Xenix which MicroSux had written and which SCO had agreed to maintain as part of the original spin-off.
The code in question was strictly SCO, not Unix. It dates back to early Xenix, which was around in the early '80s. They supported it for a bloody long time, and only ditched it now because they need to appear to oppose Redmond.
Not sure if this applies, but SCO "did" a variant of MMDF (replacement for Sendmail, which they now support) and got stuck. Some nice additions to the original, but who's using MMDF these days anyway?
They supported it for soo bloody long because they had customers that were still using it and demanded it (usually because those customers had 3rd party binary-only libs or apps).
They wanted to ditch it long ago, because it was a major pain in the ass for them, as well as a revenue drain (they had to pay royalties).
Well, at least in Linux the bugs actually get fixed.
(In a timely manner, that is.)
Funny how this chap dismisses Linux much in the same way ol' Billy does, as being pretty much irrelevant. Yep, guys, Linux *is* irrelevant. It has no future. We're just a bunch of punks who haven't a clue that SCO and Microsoft produce far superior products. But, I guess you can include IBM, Oracle, Sun, Dell, VA Research, Sybase, Corel, StarOffice, HP, and others in the list of "clueless punks" or "religious nuts."
Think I'll go call those two wily punks Larry Ellison and Lou Gerstner so we can get together, dye our hair pink and purple, and hum mantras.
I now and have been a loyal user of SCO for years now...
$1000 for a 5 user system, $150 per user for SCO's version of SMB, support? has anyone ever tried to get support from SCO? (Your not running a Compaq server? then thats not supported hardware).
Where's the y2k patch? not out yet..
and the list goes on...
I still like SCO, but i'll never buy another license again, I now only recommend linux..
I wouldn't get too worked up about the "punk" business. If you've ever had to deal with the press, you know they'll talk patiently to you for hours, then slap an article together out of the pieces that out of context are the most inflammatory. They're basically professional trolls.
Oh, I think there were a fewer boners in there. Disparaging the Linux kernel as "light weight" and "easy to understand" for example. These things are manifestly good. As a programmer, I immediately associate those properties with "fast", "reliable" and "flexible".
There are a few interesting things that become clear if you delete the usual corporate obfuscation, things which wouldn't have me too pleased if I were a SCO stockholder. Linux is driving SCO into more marginal (i.e. midrange) aplications. Historically, the low end, specifically the high end of the low end, is the best position for long term growth. The very high end isn't a bad nich either, but the worst place to be is in the midrange.
The other intersting thing is that he effectively acknowledges that because of the creativity in the Linux community, they're going to have to continue to maintain Linux compatibility.
The take home message is that Linux is on its way to becoming a de facto industry standard. Not bad for a buch of "punks".
It seems very few people have a real handle on just why there is such a high level of emotion about Linux.
It is not because Linux is so good terchnically. (It is. It is just that 'technically good' is not something most folks get all excited about.) The real issue is that OS's, and other software infrastructure, has become far to fundamental in our lives to be left in the control of special interests, be they corporate or government. And those corporations and agencies have been all to fast and willing to abuse that control.
It is a social reaction to take back control of a very important facet of our lives.
And about THAT, we can indeed get very emotional, and with good cause.
It may take "millions of dollars to run tests", that simulate wide spread deployment and use.
Linux users may - or may not - be doing ot for fun. However, wide-spread deployment and use are real, not simulated.
Free software models threaten this man's entire business. Of course he reacts with angry bluster.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
One of my ex-college mate told me that he worked as a consultant in SCO, and he himself give up on Unixware and OpenServer. He even make that exclamation that he is surprised that those two prodcuts even sells.
Cappella
Stealth Falcon
Not only that, but who is more likely to report problems? Bored, overworked test engineers, or end-users who are trying to get Linux to work on their set-up?
After reading that not very substantial article, I hardly feel "blasted." More like hit with a Nerf ball. He just parroted a few things we've already heard before with the bonus comment about being "punk kids." I just laughed. It's very hard to take these kind of comments seriously. He sounds like a man who has realized he is rapidly on his way to bankruptcy and is struggling to maintain his appearance of importance.
Very amusing, but I somehow I don't see myself formatting my box and installing some other OS with "direction." Perhaps it is because I have become a disciple of the Linux Religion (TM). I am not open to the One True Religion of Commercially Supported Software (TM). My ability to think rationally has been taken from me by those Linux zealot punk kids, and now I need SCO to give it back! Please SCO! Show me the way of truth and light!
Whatever.
(I apologize for the sarcasm, but this article was just silly.)
Judging on SCO's latest crazy antics involving anything Linux, I'd have to say that they're the "Punk Kids" in this argument.
Companies like Red Hat...
Actually, Doug, a lot of customers are buying that story. As you can see, actual sales of RH have been taking off, and that doesn't count the number of downloads of all Linux distributions. The question is, what value does SCO offer over RH, Debian, etc.?
Linux didn't break any new ground...
It doesn't need to. It embraces existing standards, and makes them more readily accessible. As a result, Linux settled into a niche in a lot of areas, especially around network services. It has a long way to go on the desktop, but is the Swiss Army Knife of networks, supporting IP, DECnet, Appletalk, amateur radio formats, etc.
Linux products aren't particularly scaleable...
That's the applications' fault, not Linux's. If you design your application properly, say using the Beowulf model, scalability becomes less of an issue. Linux is also much more portable than SCO. What hardware platforms does SCO support?
Another thing is reliability...
So, you're saying that the thousands of bleeding edge Linux people's time is wasted? Hardly. Just because it doesn't show up on a balance sheet somewhere, doesn't mean testing isn't being done. Some people like that "boring, hard, grubby work".
It seems that Doug is making a last gasp at releveance. At this point, it would make more sense for SCO to take the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach: Build a SCO Linux distribution, test the hell out of it, slap the oh so precious SCO label on the box, and charge a ton of cash for a bulletproof, certified by SCO Labs distribution of Linux.
And I'm not a Linux zealot. In fact, I'm probably going to move to Be as my desktop, but Linux really excells on the server side... Where Linux is good, it's really, really good..
What I'm trying to say is, testing has nothing to do with it. It's well-known that Linux can't address that much memory - on i386 at least.
Posted by Condescending Unix User:
/etc/group entries on our SCO Unix systems would only allow about 35 username entries for any single group. Any entries after that would not work. What a joke! (If this is some obscure SCO option that my sysadmin could have set higher, I'd be interested to know about it.)
I agree completely with your comments about SCO Unix. I learned to love Unix on SCO systems, but after getting deeper and deeper and seeing more and more problems with SCO, it was one of the main reasons I left my previous company. I now work on Solaris systems at work and use Linux at home and couldn't be happier with both of them.
For a perfect example of just how 'reliable' SCO Unix was, check out this example. The
This combined with the fact that my sysadmin couldn't get anything to compile cleanly (or at all) under SCO, led me running screaming from this OS, and into the waiting arms of Linux and Solaris.
Posted by the order of His Majesty:
ATT sold the Unix code to Novell a while back and the trademark to X/Open (I believe).
Novell renamed the code UnixWare and eventually wound up selling it to SCO.
That's why SCO has OpenServer and UnixWare.
From what I understand, OpenServer is the existing (heavily reworked) remnents of their (and Microsoft's) Xenix product.
They're trying to phase out OpenServer (understandibly) and moving to UnixWare (while working on Gemini).
Posted by Army No. Va.:
And will support industry HW based on that processor architecture.
Posted by Army No. Va.:
It is based on the AIX kernel with technology from AIX, UnixWare and PTX added. That tech will also be put into AIX 6000 where appropriate making Monterey IA-64 and AIX 6000 source compatible. Now whether IBM calls it AIX and SCO calls it UnixWare and Sequent, PTX remains to be seen or perhaps a totally new name that is company independent.
i mean, come on, he's obviously drunk.
NT is inferior because it is full of bugs yet has claims to be a release-quality product. We release stuff that is buggy, but we CLEARLY mark it as "development", i.e. the linux 2.1 series of kernels. Ones which numerous people used to be on the cutting edge, but which it was acceptable for bugs to be in. Plus, if a bug is encountered in open-source software, you can fix it.
For similar reasons, NT is inferior because it is a "release quality" product that contains more bugs than development-release free software. Yes, many kernels in the 2.1 series were more reliable than NT. Do you realize what that says about the quality of NT?
I've used open-source software that was marked as alpha quality that was far more reliable than anything Microsoft publishes.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
They're still doing OK, but now that the major DB vendors have come out with Linux versions, they're going to start losing customers.
Most of their customer (I think) come from vertical market applications. The software developers have no real loyalty to SCO, they just use it because it's Unix and runs on cheap boxes. Linux is cheaper and faster and switching is easy for them. SCO should be afraid.
Instead of bashing Linux they need to change their business model while they're still making money. Either push their own Linux distribution (with special 'SCO compatibility' and 'millions of dollars of testing' for added value) or open up their own Unix and distribute it for free. I think the first option has a lot more chance of working.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
what an asshole. Some punk kids? Maybe SCO is feeling a bit of heat from the Linux distros and this fella doesn't like it. Real mature response.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
based on the legacy presence for quite a long while (the main reason that NetWare is still alive).
I must disagree with this. There are apparently new installs of NetWare - and besides, NetWare shouldn't be in the same category with SCO. It may not be UNIX, but it's still a damn fine, and stable, piece of software (unlike SCO's UNIX OSes and Windows NT, for example).
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Nod. I think that's one reason that Sun seemed a little miffed at Linux for awhile - took the air out of their balloon that a free software system was taking away from their x86 UNIX business. But at least Sun seems to have mostly gotten over it. Sounds like SCO may not until it's too late - like when Linux completely flattens them.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
The 2.0 kernel has real reentrancy problems. Essentailly, everything was under a single kernel lock. 2.1.x/2.2.x is much more fine grained (subsystem locks). Discussion for 2.3.x includes removing the big kernel lock alltogether.
In practice, Linux manages to outperform supposedly more scalable OSes on a regular basis. Conclusion, more fine-grained locking is a win, but so far, the overall efficiency of the kernel has overcome the problem.
Crawling back to Microsoft for a spell will only motivate them all the more to pester the appropriate maintainer to fix his bugs.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I suppose people with graduate degrees and ten years of programming experience who help to develop Linux software are just "punk kids". I'll now wear a button around saying that.
I believe a issue of Linux Journal had a survey of the major Linux kernel developers to debunk this myth. I couldn't find it on the web, perhaps someone else out there has a link. If I recall correctly, the credentials of the developers were impressive.
Interesting that the weaknesses he pointed out are often seen as strength by others.
"No Roadmap" means "Market Driven". The Linux development is market driven, which means features being added is the one somebody needs. This is much more flexible than having to adhere to roadmaps.
"Reliability testing too expensive". This is another important reason Linux is such a success, as the open development model allows for a much cheaper and more extensive reliabilty testing than SCO.
Just a childish rant. Nothing to see here, move along, move along - you have other things to do.
s/SCO/Microsoft/g, and it'd be just about the same.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
We had Microsoft touting NT's superiority according to Mindcrap's tests, and now SCO is also saying that their OS is better... and AFAIK, Microsoft owns some (if not all) of SCO.
Someone correct me on this one if I'm wrong. Even better, make your own comment.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
...involved one Compaq (yeah, yeah, I know... wasn't *my* choice) server, and SCO kept rebooting in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, also, in a so-called "server" edition, you had to buy the TCP/IP stack.... separately??!!?!?! How the hell am I supposed to run a "server" with no networking, huh?
These words from the guy at SCO are the last gasp of the dying. I don't know *anyone* who likes SCO. Not nobody nowhere.
-- adr
SCO has been the laughing-stock of the Unix community for the past decade. Anybody who ran a "real" Unix had nothing but pity for those forced to toil on SCO boxen. The only thing that kept SCO alive was that the hardware was cheap. SCO was one of NT's strongest selling points -- all the FUD that has been slung at Linux were real vulnerabilities in SCO...
Michels refuses to acknowlege that it took Linux to legitimize Unix on consumer-level hardware.
Bander
What we need more of is science!
I hate to break it to ya, but us Linux finatics are being hired and at quite good salaries too.
If we weren't so finatical about our OS, I don't think it would have come this far.
--
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
just a few ideas on the article....main one being that the advantages of l*nux is the comparison with living breathing organisms that can readily adapt to the conditions and environment faster than the synthetic softeware system constructs that commercial software houses develop.
Linux didn't break any new ground...but it's nice, elegant and small, easy to understand. So now we've got some punk young kids who've taken and engineered pieces around the Unix [kernel]i get annoyed at this. l*nux is for ever showing new bit's of new software useful or otherwise, it runs on many different types of hardware, it's demands for resources are few...it's adaptable and has the ability to be modified...the dna or source code of linux can be modified as required.
They're not in control of their road map. They ship whatever happens to be current in the Linux community. When you're selling to [major corporations], they want to know who you are, where you're going, where you've been, how you treat customers.
this is true, and i wouldn't want it any other way.... we have seen the inability of major software corporations to predict or adapt their software. remember microsoft,ibm, et.,al. and the internet? l*nux can be adapted quickly as it's environment or demands change
Another thing is reliability. It takes millions of dollars to run [reliability] tests. It takes expensive people, expensive labs, expensive [electric] bills, racks and racks of hardware, and really boring, hard, grubby work. It isn't stuff that people do for fun at home with volunteers.
I'm supprised to hear this from a vendor, (but they have their livelyhood at stake here folks!)cause it's simply not true. The internet supplies l*unix with the worlds greatest testing lab and the diversity of hardware and operating conditions (makes quick comparison to the natural world) is astounding. much like the amazon rain forrest. poor old sco can only build a 'simulated park' of the potential hardware forest....no money can buy, no corporation can hope to replicate the volume and variety of testing conditions that linux has undergone
Second, Linux products are not particularly scalable and don't handle multiprocessors well.
dont know about this, can anyone comment?
A: Linux is a religion. It's like considering the Catholic Church a competitor. I'm not a religion; I'm a commercial operating system.
at least i dont have to pay to get in the door,pay to pray at the alter and pay to ask for guidence, na i'm a bloody l*nux heathen, who doesn't want to pay, just play with the source
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
speaking of modules... any idea on how much smaller SCO's hardware compatibility list is than linux'??
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
" We still think of ourselves as rebels, but we're boring establishment now. " said the dinosaurs, just before the meteor struck.
No news here; this is why SCO is aiming for binary compatibility with Linux for SCO UnixWare 7.
The problem with this strategy is that SCO is thus placing itself in a market that strongly prefers free software, without offering much additional value in their proprietary products.
Either SCO will wake up and smell the roses, or it will soon feed the roses.
SCO is being segfaulted already, in response to their earlier whining.
Yeah, you and Jesse Berst... ;)
*grin, ducking under quills*
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
it's thanks to sco that i used linux. i'd been a long time unix user and had played with the two "toy" os's (freebsd and linux) but was quite happy to stick with sunos 4.1.4 (ah... heaven). then i got a job working with sco boxes.
i'd never seen a unix box crash. well, the sun sparc server the admin in the dental school had stuck in a closet with no ventalation for a weekend... that box crashed... but otherwise i'd never seen a unix box crash.
in my first month at this company, i learned more about fs recovery and fsck behavior then i care to re-remember. sco crashed, and it crashed a lot.
so one weekend a co-worker and myself built a linux box (redhat 4.1) and managed to build a working linux based, sco targeted gcc. he ported the build environment, and i got the yp tools up and running (sco's being braindead).
in a few months we had boxes that stayed up (barring power failures), functioning nis, and better driver support then sco ever managed.
so thanks sco. for those of you using sco for development, look into the cross compiling solution. great stuff!
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
This guy's comments aren't worth getting worked up over. We *know* he's wrong, and that's it. Case closed.
I actually laughed at the poor guy. Either he know SCO is going down the tubes, in which case he's desperately grasping at the slightest chance of life, or he actually *believes* that crap he's spouting and deserves to have his dinosaur of a company struck by the asteroid known to all as Open Source.
"If you're tired of everyting come hitch a ride with me,
You'll cry out with joy when you realize you're free,
It's a trip like no other for your heart and mind,
Leaving all but the future far behind."
(Might as well have been singing about Open Source.)
I didn't think anyone could like them any less...
I propose that any future statements made by this company and/or individual be accompanied by the appropriate laugh track.
---------------------
John 3:16 - God's Public License
I remember my first experience with unix was in the early ninties on an SCO multi-user machine. It was always fucking up, and the admin had gone out of his way to make it as ugly and unuseable as possible. This probably delayed me really learning unix by several years.
This guy - Michels - is a serious weenie. I don't like him. SCO a rebel? A "rebellious corporation"? Give me a break. Only an Apple fan could believe that a corporation could be "rebellious". 'Nix users aren't that gullible or stupid.
support gun control: take guns from cops
The guy is scared of Linux, man.
What he said about Linux was true though --- without scalability, without having a good multiprocessor capability, Linux can't go BIG TIME.
So, let's make the guy even more nervous by making Linux EVEN BETTER !!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
When one talks about SCO, one thinks of two other things --- Xenix and Dinosaur.
And talking about Xenix --- do you know that the AMF corporation, --- Yes, the one who supplies bowling equipments to those bowling centers --- still uses Xenix to run their bowling alley machines ?!
Recently I popped into one of my friend's bowling center and I was surprised to see that his bowling machines were running XENIX !!!!
And the kick is he had just installed the machines last year !!!!
Wow, talk about Dinosaurs.
SCO is the supplier of DINOSAUR-TECH to all those DINOSAUR corporations, and AMF sure is one of them.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
scalability isn't really the ability to cluster.
what these drones mean when they say scalability is the ability to improve the performance of one machine by throwing more and more processors into it.
linux's ability to run on eight processors is not touted as a main feature for a reason.
OTOH, i'm not sure i've ever heard of a more than 4-way p2 box, and i'm not sure how many other platforms SCO runs on...
Somebody get our flag back!
Damn! It just sucks to be him.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
You sell your product, not bash on the competition. /.
But I guess when you really have nothing to offer, you can't do anything else. This kind of flaming should be kept to news groups and
Poor guy. What a tortured little soul.
calx
Sure Linux doesn't have an official roadmap, but when I look at SCO's "Roadmap" I see that I have to wait several years to get the features I want.
And just how did they "beat" the minicomputers? SCO is pretty much considered bottom of the barrel as far as commercial Unicies go.
Also they don't own "Unix". The Open Group does. They bought Unix system labs from Novell, but they didn't get the Unix trademark
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Sounds like sour grapes more than FUD. Well maybe his marketing people should teach him how to speak.
I personally remember SCO's Xenix release, the headaches involved with a particular client and SCO's $100 a QUESTION. (ala, what..., where and how amounted to $300.00 US) One particular thing comes to mind: USR 14.4 modem support, I hacked for a few days to get the damn thing to work, "their" tech support asked me how the hell I did it and then being nice guy I am, faxed them the info. I'm positive I never received credit, and I don't care..., but I DO hate being catogorized as a "nobody" just because I use Linux now.
Note: Now that I think about it a bit, this had to be done under a version or two after Xenix. 4.?
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
First the "fraud" line, now "punk kids". And not a good thing to say about SCO. Desperate. And not just a little sad.
You reading this, SCO?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Did anyone notice this part:
Q: But you see Linux providing modules for SCO?
A: As far as I'm concerned, it's free R&D. A lot of developers who have always preferred Unix are developing on Linux. The last thing in the world I want is some cool app and have my customer go, "Oh, God, if I only had Linux, I could get that app."
[Knocks metaphorically on Doug's head] Hello???? Is anyone in there? Where the developers lead, users will eventually follow, because that's where the applications will be.
As far as the Unix-at-home crowd of developers, the vast majority now use Linux or *BSD. Some people I know have Solaris x86. But SCO? Hah.
As a former SCO admin, I can say that I'm glad to be done with it. Of course I have myself to blame becuase I picked it. However, back in '92, there weren't as many choices for cheap Unix, and my company was on a very tight budget.
Yeah, you're right.. but it shouldn't be that way.. We should try to keep objective and not get emotional about stuff like this.
oh, well.. *sigh*
vr
Well.. I hope I won't be flamed for this, but he has a point (where's the fire extinguisher?)
There are many people that treat linux like it was sacred, and doesn't have any flaws.
F.ex. when the mindcraft test was released, many people instantly denied it.
The mindcraft test is a bad example, but what about the process/thread test where it was shown that WindowsNT actually handled forking and threading faster than linux (I'm sorry I don't have a reference, but I read about it in an LJ issue once). In this case it required a quick fix, but nevertheless it illustrates my point.
Linux is not perfect, and we have to accept that, but many refuse to.
I feel that there is a group of people that claim linux is the best and the only operatingsystem to use, but we have to keep objective and keep our minds open for other possibilities, or we will become known as short sighted nerds and hackers.
vr
"when you were good, you were really, really good. but when you were bad, you were horrid" -- Hail, _Kirk_. must listen to that song again.
The thread sw article in LJ actually showed that NT did slightly better than Linux at very high loads (> 30 I think the number was) but that Linux generally did better than NT under realistic loads.
The very high load situation could be fixed by a few slight changes to the kernel.
forking is much more expensive under NT than under Linux btw...
Linux a religion? hmm, I don't mind as long as nobody starts converting people using swords:)
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
I am one user and I have ran Linux since 94 on at least 5 different machines. Now, figure how many users there are world wide. Now, figure how many machines each of these users have ran Linux on. Now, figure the 212% this last year and the exponential growth that will surely continue.
:)
How many tests are we too now? Go figure
Romans 10:9-10
Now that ought to get some attention...
I was very disturbed by Mr. Michel's comments in this article (and the previous blustery article) where he states that OSS is just free R-and-D and that "Hey! It's free software! We can take what we like!".
I wouldn't put it past SCO to find OSS software copied directly into SCO releases and sold as their own after hearing comments like that.
Should we be worrying about commercial ventures taking OSS code and selling it as their own in non-OSS products?
Are there any lawyers out there, or do any Slashdotters out there know of a lawyer, that would be willing to work (pro bono?) on lawsuits in this area should it come to that.
Is anyone else bothered by Michels' comments?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
One word: Digiboard.
Of course, that's not exactly a ``server'' as we know it today.
We had an SCO system at a remote clinic that, from time to time, I had to get in the car and drive for 45 minutes in order to fix a simple problem that could have been done in five minutes had it been possible to hang it off our Ethernet. The pisser was that the clinic was on our network. Each of the clinician's PCs had an Ethernet card hanging off our network and an asynch connection to the Digiboard in the SCO system. Dumb terminal emulation was required to get into the SCO-based application. Stupid huh? Don't forget that SCO made a bunch of money selling inexpensive systems like this back in the days when LANs were quite expensive.
The fact that SCO was selling the IP stack separately was not unreasonable ten years ago. I doubt that they do that now, though. If they do, then SCO is dumber than I thought and it's no wonder the OSS/Intel/*nixes are eating their lunch. ("How dare those punks screw up our pricing schedule!!")
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Nuff said.
I've said all along that other Unixes will be hurt well before MS feels the pain.
My own personal experience with SCO has been that it crashes at any hint of demand on the server. I can say without fear of argument that NT 4.0 is far more reliable than SCO. Imagine that.
The only people I know who run SCO now are ones who are stuck with legacy software that only runs on SCO.
When your product is crap, it doesn't matter if it swirls at the bottom of the bowl!
Ok, enough rants, here's where I address some of his issues:
(Paraphrased) Linux has no central support, and that scares away corporate customers.
This only scares middle managers in large corporations who habitually spend most of their calories seeking out scapegoats when their poorly managed staff using inadequate tools don't get their unrealistic deadlines completed on time. Expensive support contracts are way overrated. Now that I run my own business, I'd never spend the gobs of money support outfits require for some of their products. $195/hour for wimpy Microsoft tech support? Not.
Linux has no 'roadmap'.
I have news for corporate America: There aren't any roads in today's software market. The days of monopoly control of a particular software market segment are gone, gone, gone; and the Four Horsemen who are making it so are the Internet, Linux, MP3, and data encryption. And there's a whole mongol army of marauders just behind the hill, who are ready to trample on any company that can't change fast enough to meet the next competitive threat. No software house can hope to maintain the short turnaround that Open Source software, with its hoards of volunteer programmers, achieves each and every day.
Linux isn't UNIX; SCO owns it.
SCO may own a brand name, but there's lots of UNIXes out there, or UNIX-like operating systems, that kick the snot out of it. If SCO is UNIX, then I'll have none, thanks.
'Punks' stole UNIX, and play at making a viable OS.
This was an unfortunate comment, and will likely be engraved on his tombstone. In any case, anyone who has touched both operating systems knows that Linux is much stronger than SCO, so trying to dis the way Linux came to be is immaterial. Using the word punk just shows that this guy has his head, and therefore his company's head, stuck in the old ways of thinking. Here's roadkill waiting to happen.
Enough venting for the day! I'm off to use my Linux workstation to get real work done at my ISP business.
I like them less now
Sure, you could say that and be accurate at the same time.
To infer that Linux is inhearently not reliable becasue it has not had corporate lab testing is not accurate. That is a case of sophistry hiding in bad logic.
There's more to it than this.
Mr. Michel does an interesting spin on the issue of Linux and responsibility. He doesn't say that Linux is or is not reliable. Instead he just describes the heavy resources that a corporation needs to use to test reliability. This is intended to lead you to believe that Linux has no testing because the community doesn't have a centralized lab with technicians sweating away hours over structured tests. He doesn't even make passing reference to the varied, real world, applied testing that comes from millions of users' experience.
What would you trust? Millions of users' real world experience vs. thousands of hours from a few (maybe few dozen) technicians with constructed tests. Isn't real world experience the final testing ground for commercial software today? Or are patches and service packs and incremental releases frequently released because commercial vendors didn't want to ship a fully tested product to begin with?
mikeraz
There's more to it than this.
Fact is, unix and it's funny little varients
are still no match for MVS and big irons reliability. They're toys in comparision.
The Suits know this... and you don't.
These are just the words of a very desperate man. The Linux movement is sucking the air completely out of SCO. This happened before. Remember the Mark Williams Co.? They made Coherent which was the first x86 Unix clone I used. An interesting product, they actually had a version that would work on a 286! But Linux came along and ran over them like a freight train.
The same thing is happening to SCO. They cannot compete with Linux so insane ranting is about the only business option left to them.
Don't worry, they will be out of business soon and everybody knows it.
My computer, my way. Linux.
--
Howard Roark, Architect
Howard Roark, Architect
I believe in a Man's right to exist for his own sake.
SCO is like my grandfather.
Once his mind is made up, come hell or high water, he is not changing it back.
SCO have their mind made up about Linux. I'm honestly surprised about their Linux Binary Compatibility thing - maybe there's hope for them yet.
Then again, I was at a Unix conference once, and the SCO guy was up talking about Openserver 5. At the Q&A, someone asked whether SCO will have a certain feature 'like Linux', and the guy just lost it and started yelling at him.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Yeah, I guess that's why SCO took Microsoft in front of the European Commission about 18 months ago to nullify a contract with them, and why one of their senior VPs referred to the incident as "dealing with the devil." Got any more FUD for us, Sparky?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Gee, how long did those take, less than three months? Those were the alledgedly "release quality" products, so why are you trying to blunt the previous poster's remarks with your strawman argument of, "Gee, of course development releases have bugs!" Who said anything about the development releases?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
SCO didn't support that Microsoft code for all that long. The issue was decided by the European Commission in late 1997, so I'm sure that SCO filed the complaint a while before then. SCO only owned Unix[tm] since 1995 (they bought the rights from Novell, who had bought them from AT&T, the company that made the original deal with Microsoft back in the '80s.), so we're probably talking two years max. I believe that SCO had been compaining to Microsoft for at least a year before they took them in front of the EC.
As for why they went to Europe, it's because the EC is a lot stricter in these big guy vs. little guy battles. I remember an article at the time even discussing how companies going outside the U.S. to air their complaints had become a trend even before this case. News.com or ZDnet had that article, just do a search on "SCO" AND "Microsoft" AND "european commission" and it should turn up at one of them.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I think if SCO were to create their own Linux distribution, that they would do considerably better in the marketplace than they are by clutching like grim death onto their aging code base. The SCO name still has some value, after all, but I think their Unix competetiveness is waning.
I guess this leads us to a more unusual thought. Microsoft could not only sell a Linux distribution, but would likely within months outsell all the other Linux distributors combined. I saw something like this happen with their game publishing arm. From nothing to mega-hit sales numbers. It's a phenomenon. If you're writing a game, you go to Microsoft first, because even if it turns out like crap, you will sell hundreds of thousands of units gauranteed, and a good game will probably break 1M units. If it's anyone else, no matter how good or established or gigantic, the sell-throughs are far smaller. Microsoft just has an incredibly powerful sales system.
=-ddt->
Hey, i'm a protestant and the guy call me catholic, he wiil make the guys of IRA explode everything :-)))))))
:-)))
man, the SCO guys are going Crazy
Hey, i'm a protestant and the guy call me catholic, he wiil make the guys in Ireland explode everything :-)))))))
:-)))
man, the SCO guys are going Crazy
Having said all that, I hate to say it, he *is* an ass. :) An ignorant one too, though I suppose the two frequently go together.
----------
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Maybe you're not a punk, but surely a kid. "asshole" is no more answer than his talk...
;-)
How do you think suits & corporates of all worlds can interpret such remarks of yours ? They just think you're not mature, then linux guys are not mature, then linux is immature...
Be the white dove : fly above crap rampants... La bave du crapeau n'atteint pas la blanche colombe...
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
> They're not in control of their road map.
;-)
:'-{ then Linux would perfectly survive without not much harm.
;-)
> They ship whatever happens to be current
> in the Linux community. When you're selling
> to [major corporations], they want to know
> who you are, where you're going, where
> you've been, how you treat customers.
What I understand from that is Michels means Linux cannot provide long term insgiht and can always possibly crumble (because no one really have the product). That's strong menace for customers.
I agree for the long term view & I think some kind of w3 org like would be cool for Linux.
But Linux can only strengthen, since I believe we passed the critical mass. It's now a social phenomenum, more and more people believe in it, and that makes it more interesting to others. That's like mobile phones. Who could say mobile phones will disappear ?
One can compare Linux with RISC cpu, Network Computers or Java (two have nearly disapeared and the other is not as strong as it was supposed to become). But you'll see that Linux has been more backened by big corps & is increasely (IBM, Intel & recently Dell & HP are astonishing examples). In fact Linux came into light at the right moment, just when corps saw that Microsoft was not so untouchable...
What about Asimov ? Ok I just finished "Foundation & Earth" and his books are really great ! But that's not ad I want to do here (or not only
Asimov proposed that when people believe in something, it makes that thing stronger, whether that thing really exist or not at the beginning, when people believe in it, it becomes a terrible force & nearly nothing can oppose it.
I think Linux has the potential to become such a force, and I dare think that even though Linus, A. Cox and others were in the same plane and it... had some problem...
Linux is now part of humanity.
And maybe in some decades, people will make it the 8th wonder of the world
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
I let it go the first time, but now I'm pissed. "Linux is a religion"..."punk young kids"..."no one to sue but a kid in Norway"..."We can steal what we want"... [some parts paraphrased].
It is clearly obvious how scared, desperate, and bitter Michels is towards Linux. He can see his bottom line shrinking right from under him. I can picture him in the interview, I bet you his heart was pounding and the spit was flying out of his mouth as he spouted his angry vitriole.
Keep whining, SCO. Because your customers (current or prospective) can see right through them and your ship will only sink faster.
I've refrained from bashing SCO, but I will now do so at every chance I get.
Oh I can recall the kernel panics so well on SCO Openserver SMP systems when a Windows client tried to connect with TUN NFS. What did they do when we (the place I used to work) mentioned this? They said that TUN NFS was implemented wrong. Nice justification of a kernel panic. They patched it by now, but it took well over 6 months and it's costed my former POW quite a couple of bucks in support actions...
Hamal is an yellow star in the constallation Aries.
It is 66ly away, so it doesn't alter your personality.
Well considering SCO has been arround the block a few times, you could say that SCO UNIX has both structured lab testing AND user testing.
Blar.
puh-lease! Like SCO can actualy call itself a decent Unix distro. No thanks, I'll stick with AIX.
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
Well, they have that NonStop Clusters technology (single-system image on 6 nodes), and will soon have UnixWare/ptx running on Sequent's boxen (128 quad nodes... anyone played around with these?).
Anyway, I know UnixWare is certified on some of Unisys' stuff, which is 6-10 CPU's on a single box.
Does anyone have experience with UnixWare on a >4 cpu machine? Please share your experiences.
It's interesting when you think about how AT&T (Bell Labs) released AT&T SystemV R2 to everyone for free and it (after some time at berkley) grew into r4 that is now the -arguably- defacto standard in commercial releases.
When AT&T sold the 'UNIX' license to Novell (UNIXWare), I always felt it just became another commercial OS that no can play with and you have to wear a tie to get in front of. Imagine, and it's not that hard, Linux as the New AT&T sVr4, and AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, & even SCO are 'commercialy adding features' to the OS in the same way they did with sVr4.
Idunoh, It seems like mabye embraceing Linux is the right path.
Here he goes again...
... take Linux technology with a lot less value added, and
I just roll my eyes at this guy...
>Companies like Red Hat
>they package it up and say, "Hey, this is better than SCO." Well, it isn't. And very
>few customers are buying that story.
>
Actually, they don't have to buy the story, they're smart enough to figure
it out for themselves. click here for a little comment I wrote previously about this line of thinking.
>So now we've got some punk young kids who've taken and engineered pieces
>around the Unix [kernel]
I'm a 37 year old former UNIX nerd, who has been programming in UNIX since about 1979, and am now a serious Linux enthusiast. Linux (and other free os's like FreeBSD) are the next wave, the next step in the evolution of the serious OS.
I'll take being called a "punk young kid" by this clueless guy as a compliment.
In 1979 I was a punk kid (and really was a kid) working on an operating system that no one took seriously. In 1979, UNIX: just a toy for a lot of punk kid hackers...
Like I say, a complement, apparently, I'm keeping current!
>A: As far as I'm concerned, it's free R&D. A lot of developers who have always
>preferred Unix are developing on Linux. The last thing in the world I want is some
>cool app and have my customer go, "Oh, God, if I only had Linux, I could get that
>app."
>
SCO users say that every day. That's one reason many of them are abandoning SCO for Linux in droves. Click on the link above, oh what the hell
here it is again, for an example of a "cool app" that took for bloody-ever to be ported to SCO.
Linux is not cutting DEEPLY into SCO's market because of slick advertising and empty hype. It's cutting into their market share because it is the operating system designed by the end users for the end users, like UNIX used to be. People are switching from SCO to Linux in huge waves because Linux works better.
>Another thing is reliability. It takes millions of dollars to run [reliability] tests. It takes
>expensive people, expensive labs, expensive [electric] bills, racks and racks of
>hardware, and really boring, hard, grubby work. It isn't stuff that people do for fun at
>home with volunteers.
>
Exactly!
This point proves that the primary reason people are switching to Linux is not to save a buck up front, but because Linux has the much lower total cost of ownership over the long haul.
As a former SCO developer, I know this to be true.
Funny its seems I've heard Gates say similar things. The comments about religion, its nothing new, no "road map" (oh oh buzzword bingo), must have companies for real tests, intellectual property fear, and of course companies want to buy from "real" companies. My god - does he write stuff for M$ or just read it and repeat?
-cpd
TI SYS V wants a license for the stack too.. bad enough the cards are still 600 dollars for a dinosaur like this machine. It requires a password keyed to your SPA (software protect adapter, an internal slotted card for cpu id.. when you change the mobo, you can just take the spa out and snap it into the new board. nifty)
and you would have to pay another 600 dollars for it.
Lowmag.net
Is it any coincidence that "Linux" rhymnes with "Sucks"...?
No, because it doesn't - except as a slant rhyme.
They've tried giving away copies of UnixWare (or was it OpenServer) free to home users as a way to combat Linux's popularity with hobbyists. It hasn't worked, of course. Opening up their code probably wouldn't save them either, although it would really help out the free software community.
The "SCO Linux" idea is the best one I've heard for SCO to save itself. They would have to do it quick, before all their customers finish porting their stuff to an existing distro.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
another $1000 for software development tools, SCO could be a *very* big deal today.
If they had sold it for $100 or even $200 they would have sold *many* more licenses, made much more money, and maybe even kept up with the rest of the *nix world's progress over the last 15 years.
If they hadn't put up that major entry barrier, SCO (with X) could have given M$ a run for the PC market.
But wait - SCO *IS* (*was*?) M$!!
"I remember now - THAT was the equation!"
-- Brock, stardate whatever
(What Are Little Girls Made Of)
SCO never existed except to kill the PC unix market. Its end is at hand.
Is it any surprise to see the CEO in hysterics?
Is it any surprise to hear the CEO FUD the system which has made it impossible to keep the lid on PC *nix any longer?
Go on, Mr. Michaels. Tell us what's so great about your product. Tell us one thing it can do better than Linux, FreeBSD, or, for that matter, SolarisX86!
Tell us *why* we should buy your overpriced trash.
Don't just call us kooks, anybody can do *that*!
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
I am not surprised at this reaction from the CEO of SCO, lets face it SCO have more to lose than Microsoft with the ascension of Linux.
/only/ market. Every Linux box installed here is almost certainly one SCO license and hence revenue taken away from SCO.
Look at the market that SCO aim at, low end x86 based UNIX servers. Things like branch servers etc. This is exactly the market that Linux has been penetrating so well recently.
The reason SCO are reacting so violently is that this is their
It really isn't a surprise that SCO would want to spread more FUD about Linux than even Microsoft. After all, Microsoft have a load of other revenue streams that aren't affected by Linux whereas SCO hasn't
Joe_90
--
My original reaction was that he was cranking up his own FUD machine. I've read some other stuff from him where he has been less than kind to Linux. I guess this doesn't surprise me, Linux is in direct compettion with SCO and I'm guessing that they are feeling a little heat.
I'm running Solars X86 on one of my PC's and as a result of that I belong to a Solaris mailing list. One of the guys on the list works for Sun and he has the same attitude towards Linux as Doug Michels. I think it's a natural reaction. Linux gets a TON of free press, most of it good, and the press can't get enough if it. Meanwhile these old-time Unix guys are watching this and doing a slow burn.
I think that it might benefit these Unix guys to try to capitalize on the popularity of Linux and show themselves in a positive way(thus promoting Unix), instead of coming across as angry and spitefull.
Testing
A company can afford to pay people to do very complete testing -- black box, glass box, etc. This type of testing is something nobody would want to do unless they're being paid, but to make sure something is rock solid, it really has to be done.
Linux has hundreds of thousands of people using and testing, and of those probably thousands, at least hundreds, are trying to fix any bugs they find. *But*, they are not actively looking for bugs, trying out every possible configuration, stress-testing the system, giving it worst-case scenarios. These people are just using the systems and if a bug happens to pop up during their use, they'll report or fix it.
The recent Mindcraft study helps illustrate this point. The machine they were using to do the test was wierd. It had 4 gig! of memory! In a formal test, a configuration like this might have been covered, but in informal testing, you'd just have to hope some guy was lucky enough to also have a machine with 4 gig on hand and had run it through its paces.
But in the end, the benefits of going with Linux beats the benefits of formalized testing most of the time.
With the huge Linux user base there's a pretty good chance every established piece of code has been pretty thoroughly tested. Also, if a bug pops up the source is available so you can try to fix it yourself. If what you're working on is interesting enough, you might even be able to get people help you track down the bug. Good luck getting that with SCO Unix
I once worked on a political campaign where the incumbant paid off one of the canidates in the other party to run a negative campaign against the incumbants main compentitor. Well, I am getting the same sort of feeling here.
......................................... 4,741,750 13.8%
Check out this nice little bit from SCO's SEC Filings in February.
Common Stock Approximate
Five Percent Shareholders, Directors Beneficially Percentage
and Certain Executive Officers Owned Owned(1)
------------------------------------ ------------ -----------
Novell, Inc.
Corporate Headquarters
122 East 1700 South
Provo, Utah 84606
Microsoft Corporation................................. 4,217,606 12.3%
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, Washington 98052-6399
Douglas L. Michels(2)................................. 4,028,400 11.7%
c/o The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
400 Encinal Street Santa Cruz,
California 95061-1900
Lawrence Michels(3)................................... 3,149,992 9.2%
30376 Snowbird Lane
Evergreen, Colorado 80439
Now am I the only one who thinks that Novell and Microsoft might not mind the president of SCO slamming Linux. It is just a thought. But if I was a major shareholder in SCO, I don't think I would like Microsoft dumping $25 million worth of shares.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
Just as an aside, I can recall when Mr. Michel (and his father) and users of their OS (Xenix) were considered sort of "religious zealots".
Religious OS zealots are not only confined to linux. I've read comments here, usenet, zdnet, etc from people who are religious about MS, os2, *BSD, Solaris, HURD, Amiga, hell even the Sinclair Spectrum. It's common behaviour of a segment of any userbase/fanbase. Have you never met anyone who's religious about a particular make of car, stereo, tv, etc, or a writer, actor, director, musician?
*Possibly* there are proportionaly more linux zealots (I doubt it) but you have to remember that coming from closed source OSs to the GPL world of linux can be such a `revalation' that its natural for folks to get a bit evangelical now and again.
grek
In 1996, we found that killer app that you could get on Linux but not Unix.
C++.
SCO Open Server V came with a bogus, buggy implementation of C++. So we did what every red-blooded American hacker would do: grab the G++ port.
Cygnus hadn't bothered to port C++ to SCO. We had to root around and find a private user who had ported it.
When Cygnus drops your Unix platform, you know you're marginalized.
--The basis of all love is respect
Is DG/UX dead and burried?, DG are still advertising it on their web site. I have to disagree that is was a worse OS than SCO Unix, it had excellent disk management tools and hapily ran SAMBA, NFS, sendmail and web servers. I set my first ever web server up on a DGUX AViiON and we had an UPTIME of 300 days on a busy public site.
By contrast SCO is awful. I think it must be the only UNIX that sells TCP/IP as an option and it is very poorly documented. Support was poor and the longest UPTIME we managed was about 7 days. However, I suspect Data General may agree with you that DG/UX is worse, I see you can buy AViiONs pre-configured with DG/UX, SCO Unix or Windows NT, an excellent choice which should satisfy every user.
But I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call SCO a legitimate vendor. In fact, SCO is one of the best reasons for Linux there is. I feel no sympathy for SCO; had they been a bit less greedy and a bit more into improving their system they could be reaping the benefits today. But a vendor with ideas like TCP/IP being an 'addon', and producing the worst unix I've ever had the displeasure to work with, they're just getting what's coming to them.
surely this proves one thing
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OBSOLETE HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE
Another thing is reliability. It takes millions of dollars to run [reliability] tests. It takes expensive people, expensive labs, expensive [electric] bills, racks and racks of hardware, and really boring, hard, grubby work. It isn't stuff that people do for fun at home with volunteers.
Isn't the whole point of Linux that we WILL do it for fun? What reliability test is more reliable than the consumers themselves?
-- First post (by a female living in a state that begins with M and does not end in a vowel with a birthday that falls
"I'm A Linux Punk!" w/ a pic or tux in a leather jacket and wearing sunglasses.
:) If somebody makes these, I want one! :)
Now...that's one I like!
Vox
Pain is the gift of the gods, and I'm the one they chose as their messanger...
The historical ties between SCO and Microsoft go way back. This may in fact be Fud straight out of Redmond, but channeled to attack Linux from the unix world. If Michels were smart he would simply invest money into companies like Redhat, Caldera, or even Corel and make money off this so called religion.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
He's just targeting his statements at staunchy old management in hopes of getting some more revenue. What he doesn't take into account is that this kind of management is becoming less and less prevelent in the IT world. People want stuff that works. SCO? ummm, okie doke.
I'm sorry, but I have to point something out to you. AIX is well tuned for the specific hardware it supports. And of course all that hardware is developed by IBM. You don't know how much firmware is in their PPC servers, that leaves less work for the OS. Plus, from the viewpoint of Linux and SCO there is a lot more hardware to support from many more manufacturers.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
Not true because of how the kernel was developed around the hardware. It would take a lot of work to get it to run on x86 hardware. Lets just say I've spoken to AIX developers as part of my work. If you can give me reasons for why it would work really well if it ran on "our hardware" then let me know. Right now you haven't backed up a thing you've said.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
Don't know where they found XENIX because SCO hasn't been selling it. In fact they removed support for XENIX from their UnixWare product in version 7.0.1.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
I'd really like to hear what you didn't like. I'm curious to see what was wrong with it. Any examples would be appreciated.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
I'd love to hear why you think so. Why isn't SCO on the map? What product exactly did you work on/with?
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
Can we same from you? I think so. An immature comment doesn't warrant an immature response. I just don't believe in saying non-intelligent things no matter what someone says.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
Would you like to tell me where you got that info from? I don't see it being that much if at all. Even if they do hold that much stock, it doesn't mean it governs what the company does. I can't believe people keep bringing up this stuff. Someone tell me how this means anything at all besides more FUD.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
That statement is incorrect. The Monterey project that includes SCO, IBM, and Sequent will use technology from all three Operating Systems. That includes UnixWare, AIX, and PTX.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
...aren't you just a great big asshole. I don't know about the rest of you folks, but I certainly don't think that RACIST comments are appropriate to this thread. SCO does stink; after all, it's based on a Microsoft product. However, stinky or not, and whether or not the CEO makes comments that are inflammatory, he's just trying to cover his ass.
The press likes to cover "both sides" of an issue. So if 100 people say "this is great", and 1 person says "this sucks", the press covers "both sides" of the issue.
We're tired of SCO's arrogance. If SCO had priced its products reasonably (remember Linus's reason for writing Linux), it wouldn't have this problem. But it didn't and now it does. Too bad for SCO.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Those "punk kids" are tomorrow's (if not today's) decision makers. Belittling them isn't a bright move on any company's part. This guy sounds like he's on the defensive or simply doesn't understand the market. Linux is only going to get better, he may one day regret those harsh words ala "640K is all anyone will ever need" (ahem).
:-)
Hrm, wonder how he'd feel if the "next big app" his customer wanted had a license that stated specificly that it could be ported anywhere but to SCO UNIX?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Unixware just plain wouldn't install and OpenServer ran like a constipated slug nearing its deathbed, even on the command line. I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt though, and left in on for a few days so I could try it out. "Painful" is the only way I can describe the experience.
Although the slowness was irritating, the requirement of typing in forty-bazillion digits in order to license every damn piece of software on the machine was downright unpleasant. What a pain in the ass!
"Punk kids" - lets see, I believe Mr Einstein was 26 years old when he published his Theory of Special Relativity, which the "old farts" didn't seem to be able to figure out.
And, who, but you, says that Linux people want to be Bill Gates. I believe that Mr. Torvalds released Linux under the General Public License, is that not true. Did he horde it like Mr Gates did with DOS, thinking only of bucks?
Linux an underdog, it's no underdog in my household, it's top dog, in fact it's the only dog.Linux "fanatics", perhaps some are old deadhead bored people, but Linux people have passion for their work, and thats a good thing, passion is the spice of living
Perhaps you better get your nose into your computer a little more, and you'd see information out there about hundreds of big companies using Linux. I have a link I'll share with you listing some of those companies, I believe its through linux.org (Notice it's .org and not .com, kind of tells you that they aint out for big bucks like Gates, can you imagine microsoft.org, HA!
A final note, decision makers in big companies are usually non-technical people who are slow to catch on, but they will, especially when they see how Linux can save their budgets and when some of these "punks" start showing em what can be done with it. In fact, before too long, these "punks" *WILL* be the decision makers!
Hey, if linux is a religion, does that mean we all get the religious organization tax cut?
Though you do have to admit linux users have a tendency to display the classical symptoms of fundimentalism.. overwhelming belief, a tendency to quote their leaders/book(s) whenever possible, and the willingness to go out and crusade against the infidels.
Linuxians Unite! Put down your mouses, take up arms, and lets bust some heads in the name of go^H^H Linus! Hail GNU!
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
In my experience SCO version of UNIX was one of the worst I have ever come across. I got disappointed after 10 minutes after installation - it truly sucked.
e.g. Pmwm = The horrible Panning version of MWM.
SCO Desktop = Horrible icons
XMCD = crap software
SCO Doctor Lite = crap software
need more?
My first thought on reading the article was "Jeez, this asshole is loosing it!". He seems to be digging himself in deeper and deeper. Maybe it's time for a change at SCO, not that I think that will save them. Their only chance to save anything is to totally embrace Linux.
"I'm A Linux Punk!" w/ a pic or tux in a leather jacket and wearing sunglasses.
...take the FUD and run with it!
Michels takes the cake when he starts making disparaging remarks about a competitor. If he's so concerned about competition, he should take on Sun or say IBM and complain about why their products sell more than his little bitch-bitch..nag-nag..whine-whine shit faced product. I think he's been watching his own face too many time in the mirror. Hey SCO-Master, this is called a free market. And competition thrives.
PS: Torvalds is from Finland, not Norway !
Second, Linux products are not particularly scalable and don't handle multiprocessors well.
I'm sick of hearing this with nothing to back it up. Ok, am I wrong or did a cluster of P2 Linux machines match the performance of a Cray Supercomputer? Wouldn't you consider that pretty f**kin scalable?
In software, there are *important* jobs that it's hard to get volunteers for, such as writing documentation, ensuring the software has a *user*-friendly interface and not just a *geek*-friendly interface, etc...
This is why I think we need to welcome a certain amount of commercial interest in Linux, if we really care about "world domination". A certain amount of commercial interest in Linux will ensure that these important (but unexciting) jobs get done.
His specific argument about inadequate testing is dumb though. This is an area where Linux really excels -- millions of real users pounding on the software will find bugs you never would have found in a testing lab. ESR has eloquently described free software's advantages here in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."
Now isn't that cute. A big time executive resorting to name calling. Sounds rather pathetic to me. That was really uncalled for. If a person in his position can't express himself better than that....well.....need I say more?
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
Any business man knows, badmouthing the competition (and i dont mean, product x is faster then product Y) in a fasion such as this is VERY unprofessional. This is something you'd hear out of a beered up porch monkey. hah, SCO CEO a porch monkey.... no wonder they suck so much.
Atleast Microsoft has the decency to say "Linux isn't a threat", rather then call us a bunch of punk kids. Well, We'll see who has the last laugh.
Allright, I was a bit harsh, and i didn't mean to come across as racist, because im not.
:P). This isn't something you'd see come out of a CEO.
Anyway, It was just really unprofessional (yeh, and like my comment wasnt... my bad
Also, SCO was happy its product lost its ties to microsoft. SCO Unixware 5 had Microsoft code in it, then when 7 popped up they cheered when it was gone.
Sorry if I came off like an ass.
I'm sorry but I have been working on Unix systems
since V7 and SCO is a piss poor Unix. If you
ever had to port apps to many *nix system, and
I have, SCO is always the odd ball system.
They seem to make bad choices in thier implementation but still follow the letter
of the law as far a standards go.
In fact if you look at many Open source packages
there is often a disclaimer about SCO or the
binaries are not available for SCO.
I for one am very happy that we have droped
support for SCO at my current company.
Finally got myself a username... ;->
Anyway, did AT&T sell it or license it? If they sold it, that would mean that Digital, IBM, Sun, HP, etc., have to pay royalties to SCO; no wonder they're so interested in Linux...
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
I know for a fact that OpenServer still requires a license for the TCP/IP stack. I installed 2 upgrades last year for a client and we needed to get the license for the networking stuff.
That, and it took about 2 1/2 hours to install on a Pentium II 450 with a 40x CDROM! What's up with that?
*squash*
Oh, sorry about that. You were too insignificant to notice there... I didn't even notice the flag you were waving or the trumpet you were blowing.
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Most software under Linux does the "release early, release often" thing. Do you think MS sit around after the new release of NT?
You're arguing apples and oranges: In both cases, bugs are worked on, but due to business reasons, MS can't release a new patch or whatever each day. Instead they release service packs and some fixes. In many Linux projects usch as the kernel, the source is open and developers release what they've got, acknowledging the software may have bugs (heck, murphy's law: there is always another bug).
As the source is free and easy to distribute via the internet, they do that and we all give the stuff a pounding. Kernel 2.2.0 was bound to have bugs, as was NT 4.0. How many ~50-70 meg service packs now? 4. Hmm... there seems to be bugs in Service Pack 4, causing the company I work for to stick to SP3 even though SP4 is supposed to fix "y2k" issues, even though the y2k issue is being dealt with in a very serious manner here.
Le point? Both development releases and "release quality" stuff is bound to have bugs. Just hopefully less in the "release quality" stuff.
There was a couple of nasties in 2.2.0.apparently. I waited for 2.2.1., and was running it since it was released until yesterday. No issues here dude, my box just keeps on cruising.
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"