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What if Red Hat bought SCO?
Thexder wrote to us with a curious piece on what RH should do with all it's new found wealth: buy SCO. It's a crazy idea, and gives me a headache when I try to analyze it, but the author does have some interesting points.
disclaimer:Hemos owns shares in Red Hat
Yes. This idea is brilliant. Imagine the ad: Linux - the official Unix.
A couple of points that have gotten overlooked that makes a RH acquisition of SCO attractive:
1. An existing customer base. Seriously, most people who have fought^Wused SCO Unix have an existing investment in Intel-based hardware. Being able to tell them that for a minimal cost they have an upgrade path to a UNIX-like OS that is cleaner than SCO & with more of a future will not only keep these customers, but will immediately increase the Linux marketshare.
BTW, I have used SCO Unix. It sucks. (You have to recompiled the kernel & reboot to change the IP address? Give me a break. Even NT has a better answer.)
2. SCO owns the copyright on UNIX, last I heard. (They bought it from Novell who bought it from AT&T.) Need I say more?
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I think that this article raises some interesting ideas. I am not too sure if I agree with all them but I do have to say that I have been thinking quite a bit myself about where Red Had could use it's clout to aquire technology and re-release it under the gpl/lgpl, etc.
I really do agree with Zedlewski's point that buying out another open source outfit would not accomplish anything worthwile.
So the question becomes one of where does Linux and open source get the most bang for the buck? Does SCO own anything that is really worthwhile? Who does??
One idea that tickles my fancy is buying out Imprise/Borland. They are one of the last great independent software tool vendors out there and having delphi under gpl would be just plain cool. They also have some interesting database technology.
So what do people think? What other outfits should Red Hat look at??
Also, the owners who have more than 5% stake are:
I don't have time to read their by-laws, but if someone tenures an offer and the majority of stockholders vote to accept, it usually doesn't matter what one investor thinks or wants.
_damnit_
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
...assuming you can find someone who is willing to trade for an overvalued stock at its market price. I imagine Red Hat would have to offer their stock at a significant discount for this to work.
Screw that! That's like saying lets jump on the Misrocoft bandwagon just because they own 90% of the PC OS market. SCO has to hang in there and create new customers or die. They have to make it better or suffer what so many other OS's have suffered, the reality that something better is out there and taking over. SCO is too expensive and will lose, just like Misrocoft.
*sigh* What part of SCO/Solaris/BSD were you NOT able to grok?
And, what part of the glibc5/glibc6 problems are you not groking?
And, calling someone you don't agree with 'dumbass', not to mention accusing them of using a crack-pipe is a fine example of why no one has any respect for the Linux community. Its childern like you that give the OpenSource and linux movements a bad name.
When you can debate like an adult, please feel free to contribute in a meaningful way.
Another useful technology Red Hat could set free would be the mtv MPEG player (www.mpegtv.com). I don't know if there are intellectual property issues that would prevent that being turned into free software, but it breaks my heart to see such a good bit of software trapped in shareware limbo.
fish and pipes
The only problem with that is that (I think, I don't know) the Unix certification requires CDE and Motif (blame TOG).
Gee, my disto has libc5 in a place where it plays nice with libc6. And no I dont want to debate like an adult because I dont really care about your meaningless FUD.
--fatboy
Well then, Microslop shoud buy back this 'restriction'. It has the bucks. Cant and MS should not be voiced in the same sentence. If I was a MS, I would buy Troll...
Why are you so proud of yourself for being ten years out of date? Sure - Xenix sucked. It's not as buggy now - it's called Openserver - but you haven't been paying attention to the rest of the story. UnixWare is a SVR4 kernel rewritten by people who are pretty damn good. There are very few kernel locks. These people know how to code and it shows - it clusters and does 4way+ really smoothly. Hammer UW and you'll see how good it is.
Please do not spend 90 million dollars like
all the other merger-crazied accounting
dagger and cloaking hi-tech companies does.
Indeed, many people have come to recognize
the importance of bringing UNIX a friendly
face--this was the overwelming theme that
brings logic to the IPO of RedHat... whenever
you create software you create value--especially
OSS software. RedHat was definitely IPOed to
answer to the need of customers, employees,
and investors. However you prioritize it RedHat
is not another proprietary software company
with a closed source model. The RedHat brand
is powerful and people will continue to true
and purchase all sorts of services associated
with RedHat innovated OSS software. We won't
need to imitate proprietary companies hoarding
and killing close-source software (Think SUN's Wabi and maybe StarOffice too if Sun keeps all the source to themselves)--even if
they are a serious form of money-making method.
I realize that a lot of linux users don't buy
into the GNU and OSS philophy of software innovation. It's sorta like being an immigrant
to America. You enjoy the green card. But that's
it. But I invite you to do more than that.
Using thier money to "Aquire" more property is not the way of Red Hat. That is just plain stupid, and, only ONE of the suggestions in the article.
I call you attention to item number 5, intitled "Tools." Ahhhh... People use applications, not OS's... Hmmm...
Red Hat has money, now, if they want to keep the support of the Open Source Community they need to:
Thus they would be limited to doing things that would be expected to be a good thing for SCO the company.
????
I'm surprised this wasn't the first thing mentioned in response to this article!
RH should absolutely try to buy TrollTech and GPL Qt!
SCO are lusers. They were once the leading x86 *nix, and they squandered that lead. SCO's glory days are long over.
The idea that RHAT should buy APLX makes a lot more sense. Does anyone know if the official RHAT distribution includes Applixware on the applications CD? And even if it does, bundling Applixware into the mainline distribution should generate some very interesting press.
--
I'll agree that SCO classic is awful, but SCO ended up with UnixWare which was originally written by Bell Labs (I think) to be the reference implementation of SVR4 (which is basically what Solaris is). I used it back when Novell owned it and thought that it was a pretty good system. Reguardless of what your religous opinion is of SVR4, a lot of work went into it and it is True Unix. Now what RedHat would do with it I can't say, but have the feeling that it would hurt their focus as a Linux company.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Everything I've ever read from there has been very juvenille and poorly reasoned (whether I agreed with it or not).
Slashdot, unfortunately isn't a whole lot better as far as submitted content goes.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Last I heard, Microsoft held approximately 14% of SCO, with Novell holding 10-11% and the younger and elder Michaels holding about 22% between them. If one of those didn't sell out, it would be difficult for Red Hat to buy more than 50% of SCO.
Colombia.
:)
Examine my email address to see why i make sure to point this out.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
This software, a turnkey vertical market solution and GUI development toolkit was ported to SCO UNIXware and SCO Open Server in two hours and fifteen minutes. You can see screen shots at http://www.viewtouch.com/posinterface. Anybody LIKE YOU AND ANYBODY YOU KNOW who has tried to port something to SCO may be anal retentive, but fortunately, the world's full of people who are not like you, especially when it comes to porting to UNIX. Now, who will buy Red Hat? Intel, IBM, Microsoft? The people with the money, the real movers and shakers, are not laughing; they are smiling with contentment.
When I first began searching for a UNIX which
would run on PCs back in the late 80s, I
contacted SCO and asked them to send me some
literature. About a month later, some stuff
landed at my door step which had little to do
with what I wanted to know. Accompanying the
stuff was a SCO packing list which was printed
on what looked like ditto master paper (for those
of you too young to remember what ditto masters
were, think bottom most copy of your Fed Ex
label, the one where you have to press the pen
down real hard to get anything to come out).
The packing list output itself was of COBOL
vintage.
I'm a quick learner so have been ininterested
in SCO since then.
:-)
One can't read the article and be own the first post offcourse. It's a matter of priorities. I think our first-poster's priorities are very very clear :) Maybe the submit-page shold check the submitter's history to see if he/she has read the article and if he/she hasn't then just give the comment -1 points or something like that :)
0x or or snor perron?!
Sco who?
That's the dumbest thing I've read today.
r@m
I got into an argument with someone about this. But doesn't SCO have a majority holding of Open Group, the gang that owns the UNIX name?
Yes, that will get attention. RHAT buys SCO, gets a hold of Open Group, qualifies Linux for all distros, and gets $$ off the other UNIX vendors.
But if Red Hat did buy SCO and acquire Monterey, they couldn't make it free, because the copyright is shared with IBM. They'd have to persuade IBM to release it as free software, or else start selling non-free stuff, or else ditch Monterey altogether.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I know another company whose policy with competition is "buy, divide, assimilate, destroy" (clue: think Redmond). Are those the footsteps RH should follow?
More practically, anyone who's seen the boot sequence of SCO should take a good look at the upteen companies whose copyright is mentioned. I doubt anyone could GPL all that code: too many people have a finger in the pie of SCO.
And last, RH does well at one thing: distributing Linux. Too many people have made mistakes in the past by being Jacks-of-all-trades, and Master of none. VAR is fine. Leave the innovation to others. Do one thing, and do it well.
ian.woodhouse@hyder.com
Pluses:
1. The endless nagging about who ate whose breakfast will stop
Minuses:
1. A linux oriented company will inherit a descendant of the only Micorosft attempt to write Unix. See SCO docs for details.
2. Unfortunately 1 is not funny. Anybody who have tried to port something to SCO (especially the older versions) will say so...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Will the Slashdot demigods start censoring comments that dare to criticize RedHat?
Then again, this site has never been a source of unbiased information.
No one forces you to read Slashdot. If you don't like their methods, leave. They are free to operate the site the way they want to. It's their site, not yours.
Red Hat's main attraction is the open source nature of its operating system. SCO and the other proprietary Unices do not care about this. It would be a major conflict of interest and I would start to distrust Red Hat. Mark
In case TrollTech goes bancrupt or is purchased, Qt will be released under the BSD license.
RedHat could of course put later versions under LGPL.
SCO is the Santa Cruz Operation, a commercial Unix vendor (who hasn't been doing real well lately).
Pancakes is the better part of valor.
$950 for 5 Incident Support Package through Red Hat, $35,000 for thier Silver Support Package, not exactly the greatest bargins, Red Hat needs to come up with a stream line mass market support system.
SGI is loosing ground, and support is one of thier lackings. SGI using Red Hat was thier solution, and it's not working as you can tell from the $16 to $11 drop. SGI's MIPS products are solid on the hardware side, but just troll the SGI newsgroups, and you will find users are very unhappy with IRIX. It's not that UNIX in general is giving them problems, but SGI's problems with IRIX, various bugs, chaos in patches and updates, nightmear upgrade stories, etc.
Buying SGI would only give Red Hat another Support headache, just when they really need to get thier support more streamline, and focus it on a mass market. It would be a move in the wrong direction.
Now, someone like Compaq or Dell on the other hand would be an excellent place to form a "partnership" on a long term scale. Red Hat needs to get in tight with one of the Intel based hardware vendors that can help them scale up to 2+ CPU servers with RAID on one hand, and looking down towards laptops and PDAs on the other hand. Those are some areas where the growth would be a little less painful. And a "partnership" rather than a "buyout" would allow them to gain some "help" and not "aquire the headache."
If SGI is to get back on it's feet, it needs to do it on it's own. It's not thier hardware that is lacking, it's thier management. The few good techs never seen to see the light of day, or leave for other companies. The bad techs answer the phones and go to trade shows. Bad marketing, bad service, bad customer relations, and overpriced service/support contracts for a product that ends up a major headache for many consumers is going to keep driving them even lower than $11. Keep waiting for them to "bottom out" and get bought by someone like Compaq or Dell, who have proved they CAN handle the hardware buisness in todays market.
Then I'd like to see VA Research IPO, be a HUGE success, then buyout SGI and Caldera. Now, that would be a Linux market. VA could bolster Caldera enough to make it more head to head with Red Hat, and SGI would fit in thier product line pretty well, giving them MIPS to add to the Intel line.
Then all the "extra" vendors out there could fill in the gaps with AMD systems. Like... Penguin Computing and Mandrake... Yea... Hey.. let's pair everyone up...
ie is a very real threat to the standards of the
web/net and indirectly the desktop. for those
who have not been following along, netscape
proved that sight designers follow the market
more than any standards and thus netscape became
a more important standard than w3.org. it seems
like ie is currently the most popular browser
(i dont know if this is true but alot of people
seem to believe its true) so content developers
will go with that instead of standards, thus
locking out others platforms. when they have
the browser market, then they have the desktop and
may be able to take the net itself. if i seem
paranoid, im only rehashing what many of us already know. there has to be an open alternative
to ie that people will actually want to use!
I wonder if there's a market for open business plan makers. (Electronic door to door market guru?). I wonder if he has a business plan for IBM, MS, Compaq and Sun handy too...
In fact, I could use a business plan myself
---
In theory it sounds like it can be a good idea, but what many people forget about is the culture clash that must be worked out with companies that are bought out/merged/divested/"whatevered."
9 8.htm
It would end up being a management and communication nightmare. You can read this for more information about this problem:
http://www.hewitt.com/news/pressrel/1998/08-03-
Mandrake has been building a business on Red Hat and not doing too shabby a job of it either. Mandrake needs Red Hat at least for the moment and Red Hat would benefit from what Mandrake has done with their product/distro. Owners of both companies would prosper and we'd get a better product.
Oi! You're that bloke who sold me Luxembourg the other day! I'll get you for that
---
..some probably use heroin or LSD. But no doubt, pushing RHAT to 80 something shows they are under some kind of narcosis. But seriously, guys, do you really think RedHat can continue to have such a high price, without profits? Sure, the daydream will last for some time, but it will be shorter than many can imagine. After that, SCOC will seem as an immense piece to swallow. Besides, doesn't SCOC have a "poison pill" strategy voted?
In today's free market, a corporation needs synergy. Red Hat needs a way to vertically integrate with retail outlets, benchmarking companies, fast food chains, movie theaters, theme parks, pharmecuticals, TV broadcast companies, chemical weapons manufacturers. That is the only way a company can give its customers true choice.
This way, RH LINUX can be inserted into a vertical market and come out as practically any sort of product! We can have "Heroes of Open Source" action figures, a hit thriller movie, happy meals, anything you can think of!!!! Plus, if you've secured heavy investments in media content companies, you'll always have rave reviews of your various products but a phone call away!
support gun control: take guns from cops
Disclaimer - after a looonnnnggg time, this poster owns shares in Red Hat. Woo Hoo!
...
Actually, I think you've got some good points there. I don't know about buying SCO (depends on the price), but grabbing a significant stake might be a good idea. And I love the part about helping out Borland and other tool providers.
However, my personal interest is that Red Hat stock prices drop. So I can buy some more. Stop going up! Please
Will in Seattle
>And no I dont want to debate like a adult because I dont really care about your meaningless FUD.
If you REALLY don't care, they why are you responding?
Face it, Terry Trapp, you can not debate as an adult, because you are not bright enough. And the whole concept of the Linux how to about advocacy is lost on you.
RedHat is a business. Their model is like few others, and they do a lot of good things(TM) for the open source community and for Linux, but they are still a business.
You pose the question "where does Linux and open source get the most bang for the buck?"
This is the wrong question. It should read: "Where does RedHat get the most bang for the buck?"
Let's face it, the value of the free publicity RedHat receives is greater than their $10M in gross sales. The last thing they need to do is buy software companies or vendors and *give* their goods away. They need a solid foothold in something more than an emerging market. What is best for linux, and best for open source, is not always what is best for RedHat.
Purchasing SCO seems like a sound business decision... and very cool. It would benifit Linux, RedHat, and Un*x administrators and developers as a whole. Exciting!
-Computers hate being anthropomorphized.
Regarding getting paid less as a programmer...
When CAD came along, did the architects get paid less? Nope. They just do more with better technology...
The point isn't at all to get paid less. It's to get paid roughly the same rate and be more productive. There is plenty of work to be done programming computers, and I'd like to get to some of it instead of wasting my time with licensing issues and who owns what.
Doing an Office2000 install... MS now uses a 25 character license key. Good god folks, what next, 50 chars? 100? Will we soon hafta punch our entire genetic code into the damn license key box?? If only outfits like MS would spend a little more time working on their OS'es and apps, maybe they wouldn't hafta worry so much about protecting their revenues. (grumble grumble...)
-- Charlie Wilkinson Freelance Deity - Fire & Brimstone in Stock - Smiting While-U-Wait!
Well, thanks for that comment. SCO is doing UNIX since 20 years. How long others working with/on UNIX ? UNIXWARE7 is the current release, and it's way cool! has the fastest C compiler currently available and a great C++ as well. They offer Skunkware (collection of freeware tools) on a CD that ships with the product. (cdrecord,kde,lxrun,egcs,perl,bash,...) - since ages they have a fully w95 emulator since years they have a full media (including doc) as a "free" version for noncommercial use (for you guys) - order it at their website. by the way, lxrun (Linux emulator), Tarantella, PerkUP all was introduced by SCO. They doing well in most areas, of course some problems (like others have too) Oh well, they earn money with their products and paying people from that - something you also like to do somewhen.
Well, you should try to do some development on SCO. No one support sthem. There are NO memory leak detectors on the market for SCO anymore. Everyone's dropping support. Their tech support is abysmal. I may be wrong, but the OS (OpenServer 5.0.5) didn't even seem to support threads! Instead, the "task library" (based on papers by Bjarne back in 1987) is included to provide thread emulation.
Thanks, but I'll stick with Linux.
Tom
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tom McKearney
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
That assumption has been made by a lot of companies recently if you look at the recent state of some mergers (see WebMD-Healtheon).
Whoops, sorry, didn't mean to shout. But, after reading all the BS above and then coming across a gem like this I just had to.
1000 SlashDot sigs
Ok, so I examined your email and I noticed that it is a .edu. I therefore assume that you're educated in both spelling and geography. Congrats. If you could examine my breath right now, you'd observe that I stayed up all last night drinking vodka and salad dressing. I think I can be excused for not being able to spell or punctuate correctly. If not, I'll just pass out now. Thanks,
--Shoeboy
If you have actually used both, you would know that Corel's WP office suite is much better. Applixware is ugly and lacks some really basic functionality.
At least he told you he was biased.
So, let's moderate your post down, ok?
;-)
Disclaimer: I wish I owned more shares of Red Hat, so sell yours after the 30 day mark so I can buy it cheap.
Will in Seattle
One of the old jokes about SCO's habit of making everything a separate product: "Well of course it comes with ls. -l, however, costs extra."
A long time ago, Microsoft decided to try to make an x86 UNIX. They called it Xenix, and lo, it sucked.
A couple of enterprising characters from Santa Cruz approached Bill and offered to buy an exclusive license for the code, plus rights to port MS applications to the new OS. Bill thought, "Hell, who wants a x86 UNIX anyway? It's a piece of junk- SURE!"
These Santa Cruz characters turned Xenix around in unbelievable time. Soon, it rocked. It was fast and stable. Moreover, it had one of the first and best POSIX and C2 implementations on commodity hardware. (something MS still can't manage over a decade later) Thus SCO totally conquered the BIG $$ government market that MS had been aiming at. This made Bill extremely mad.
One day, the licensing checks from SCO to MS were a day late. Bill grabbed his lawyer, hopped a plane from Redmond to Santa Cruz. Bill and showed up at the door of a little yellow house in Santa Cruz that was SCO. Bill banged on the door and threw a HUGE tantrum, screaming "I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE!!" and claming he was there to reposess the Xenix source code. Meanwhile, somebody slipped out the back door to the bank and got Bill his check. SCO was saved, but bill was still mad.
Next time the contract to port MS apps to UNIX/Xenix came up, Bill had a demand. "Write us a POSIX layer for our new OS!" SCO: "Screw you!" Bill: "Fine, no apps for you!"
They're still feuding. Of course, Bill has gone on to fame and fortune on the back of applications like Word and Excel as much as Windows, but he still hates SCO. They will always be a thorn in his side until, with his billions of dollars and hundreds of programmers he can finally produce a POSIX and networked C2 certifiable system like those few hackers did in a couple of months. He'd love to get his greedy paws into the gov't market, still SCO's bread&butter.
If anything, Red Hat buying SCO would be a great way to inject Open Source code into the US Gov't, and we all know this would be a great thing.
Um....no. First of all, because it's stupid/cenorship, and quite frankly, no comments here are going to make any difference to the stock.
Also, the SEC would put anyone who did that in jail/big fines.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
And this post isn't.
A juvenille post about juvenille postings.
Noone's forcing you to read anything.
Crawl back into your hole.
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
I laughed my ass off (and I really truly believe that it's a better idea than buying SCO.)
assuming that their employees could be trained to the OSS vision.
Why does this sound frightenly like a Soviet-style "Reducation Camp?"
Yep. It's going to happen. So?
As if most of the content elsewhere on the internet is any better?
If you can do better, write some articles for osopinion. Or Linux*.com Or *bsd.org Or whatever it is that floats your boat.
Hell, start your own damn site.
(And believe me, I've seen worse from other sites)
SCO is one of the lamest, nastiest UNIXes it has ever been my misfortune to be exposed to. Redhat doesn't need to acquire that crap. I worked with Xenix a decade ago and in recent jobs have worked with their later unixes. I had hoped that over the interim 10 years something had improved with their OS but you know, not one single fucking thing had. SCO may have been able to be profitable when they were the only UNIX on X86, but these days I don't see any value in the company.
Then at least they'd get a decent UN*X!!
Seriously, SGI stock is really a bargain now, as investors stupidly took the Linux announcement and the Belluzo announcement as BAD news, the fools.
It dropped from $16 to $11, and should have gone the other way. Doesn't that mean it will eventually climb to $21 or more?!
If RHAT doesn't buy SGI, then at least those who flipped their RHAT should...
Uh...actually you can. What you're forgetting is that you can use stock to buy companies. It's done all the time, usually under the moniker of "stock-for-stock" transactions. As long as the acquisitions are additive, investors will not punish the company for minor dilution. So, in a sense, RHAT does have a very real currency.
I believe if gpl'd that Qt would become the de facto gui toolkit for linux. Even though it would be _free_ there is still a lot of benefit to whoever "controls" it. If RH doesn't snap it up soon, Mandrake probably will.
GPL would not be good for Qt. It would put it at a disadvantage compared to GTK+ where propietary software is concerned. Placing Qt under the LGPL would completely, once and for all, level the playing field between Gnome and KDE.
With all of that said I think that if Red Hat bought Troll Tech Qt would automatically and irrevocably be placed under a BSD/MIT style OSS license. Someone else may be able to verify this. The Trolls have made their company rather unatractive to purchasers by making their main asset unsaleable.
I don't think this is a good idea. The Qt developers are very good at what they are doing. Being burned by GPL advovates in the great KDE/Qt flamewar I think they would quit. This would cause Qt to lose momentum. Better if SUSE bought Troll Tech at poured resources into KDE.
RedHat should stick with GNOME and of course ensure compability with KDE. I think that is a recipe to beat Microsoft on the desktop.
Otherwise, buying Cygnus would be a great idea since Cygnus is much more important for Linux than RedHat is.
Well, you're only partially right. Microsoft developed one of the first versions of Unix for the x86 market, called Xenix. (I used to have an Altos 586 machine with Microsoft Xenix. It was an 8086-based machine with 512K of RAM, and it allowed five concurrent users to log in on dumb terminals. Not great, but definitely not a disaster.)
Microsoft had to pay a fairly stiff royalty to AT&T on each copy of Xenix they sold. Microsoft doesn't like this sort of arrangment, and decided to divest their "Santa Cruiz Operation." And so SCO was formed as a free-standing entity.
As a condition of the divestment of Xenix, Microsoft agreed to never enter the Unix market with a competeing product. Therefore they are barred from producing their own Unix (Microsoft Linux is a legal impossiblity because of this.)
nor is it meant to be.
Linux is a Unix-like operating system, written without access to the original Unix code. OS's such as FreeBSD, or Solaris could be branded "Unix", as they are both direct decendants of Unix (FreeBSD from the BSD branch, Solaris from the System V branch). Even MacOS X could be called a Unix, as it is based on BSD. However Linux could not and should not be called Unix, because it isn't, it's Linux (or GNU/Linux).
I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I consider Linux to be better than some of the real Unices. However Linux is not a Unix, and while I realize I'm being a bit anal about this, it annoys me when people confuse the two.
Ture, but that's assuming someone who currently holds SCO stock would like to trade it for Red Hat stock. Do you really think Doug Michels wants Red Hat stock?
Drinking salad dressing? I know you're a weird one, Shoeboy, but I didn't know you were that weird.
But I have a real question. In your letter, you mention in passing that Linux is destined to lower software sales revenue, and I guess you're commenting that someday programmers will get paid less. Do you see that as a Bad Thing, and if so, how can you come to terms with being such a greedy bastard, and if not, how are you going to buy vodka and salad dressing when the revolution comes?
This is horribly off topic, but shouldn't that be {g,k}panel? KDE and Gnome are just collections of apps that are intended to look similar and play well together.
Its not true that it wouldn't mnake any difference to the stock - slashdot has I'm sure quite a few readers who trade actively.
Secondly, the "censorship" argument has got to be the weakest rebuttal I've ever heard. Don't tell me thats the best you can offer in defense of possible stock manipulation.
A huge number of peopl would not want their "Silver Support" subscription with a $35,000 price tag!!
I am talking about CDROM.COM style subscriptions, to the MEDIA, not the support. Red Hat could easily use it's financial resources to put out a quarterly distribution that included all the latest and greatest applications and information on a CD for under $100 a year (which would still be outrageously high priced for a total of maybe 8 CD's a year, which would probably cost them $1-2 per CD to produce).
They should be maintaining a solid base of applications anyhow for thier product, and batch runs on a CD burner that would crank out some disks to drop in the mail with a little "product brocher" or something would make good marketing sense for them (because it would provide them with the information they need to know about who might be willing to pay for at least the media, Plus, give them a direct way to let thier users know what new products and services like support contracts were avaliable).
If AOL and Microsoft can send out Free CD's to people a few times a year without cost to get people to just consider using thier browser or internet service, I would sure think Red Hat could use a mechinism like this to keep in contact with thier "bulk" customers, and provide a valuable service at a reasonable price.
SCO has come a long way since then, folks. OpenServer and UnixWare both have fully embedded and fully functional TCP/IP stacks. UnixWare 7 has the best C/C++ development system I've ever seen. Their system administration tools are without rival. Tarantella is a revolutionary idea and a good step in the direction towards server-centric computing with thin clients. And SCO is vigilant to make sure most of the Open Source applications are available for their OSes in pre-ported binaries (skunkware, freely available from sco.com). SCO also contributes to the Open Source community itself (lxrun is the first of several open source initiatives by SCO). What SCO does a terrible job of doing is marketing and PR. Every post in this forum about SCO reflects a reputation that is based on people's experiences with SCO *years* ago. Nonetheless, despite these experiences (and despite some very real challenges today), SCO continues to be successful. Their stock (SCOC) is now trading in the 8's, up from the 2's not too long ago. SCO owns the Unix technology as oringally developed by Unix System Labs and AT&T, and has continued to advance this technology. Yet, when SCO is mentioned, people conjure up images of a SCO long past. This is bad PR on SCO's part. Plain and simple. The SCO that sells UnixWare 7 and Tarantella is becoming a completely different outfit than the SCO that sold Open Desktop and Xenix. On top of this, SCO is still making a killing from OpenServer sales, a good five years after that product's initial release. In short, I don't know if buying SCO would be good for either Red Hat, SCO, or the industry. However, I think Red Hat would get a great deal.
RHAT's not going to buy Corel, so who's left? Applix!
Explain. I thought it was interesting read at the very least and most of it sound marketing strategy. Should redhat follow these instructions I see it's profits increasing at the cost of potentially alienating free software developers not paid by redhat.
You're right! The declaration that something is wrong and therefore he would never do it should *never* be enough! I demand Hemos be executed *immediately* for crimes he never committed!
Visbroker the crown jewel of Borland, Not to mention JBuilder. Best of the breed and if open sourced would accelerate the adoption of GPL ed tools at a rapid rate. Both GNOME and K Inc. need not fight over Orbit/MICO. They now would have an industry standard Broker architecture in hand.
I agree that LGPL would be more appropriate, but Qt can -NEVER- be LGPL because of the way TrollTech has set it up?
Any way to allow it be LGPL instead of BSD/MIT if sold?
SCO has several license agreements with Microsoft pursuant to which Microsoft has provided software technology to SCO, including XENIX. Microsoft has rights to terminate its licenses with SCO in the event of the acquisition of SCO by a competitor of Microsoft, which may affect any such acquisition. SCO believes that, if such an acquisition occurred and Microsoft canceled these licenses, SCO could obtain alternative technology from other sources and could incorporate such technology into SCO's products, or alternatively, SCO could continue operations without such technology with no material impact to its business. However, the loss of any significant third-party license, or the inability to license additional technology as required, could have a materially adverse effect on the Company's results of operations until such time as the Company could replace such technology.
This text (and all other references to XENIX being a current product of SCO) has been removed from the 12/98 10-K.
Link to a no-bullshit article on SCO. BTW, the clima on slashdot made me wish that RedHat cooled down a bit. I didn't like RH before because I found it monopolistic, but with such a support from some slashdotters, I dislike it even more. Go SuSE, go Caldera, go Slackware, go Debian! Down with RedHat! :o) Had to vent
I agree wholeheartedly. I am using UnixWare 7 (as well as Linux) and this version is very stable, slightly slower than Linux, and can be very secure. One big bonus of SCO UnixWare is that all the drivers and settings are dynamically configuable, just like Linux, with the exception that you don't need to go through a ton of menu options to compile the kernel (which compiles a damn sight faster than the Linux kernel). And I believe that if RedHat did buy SCO then it would most likely hurt both Linux and UnixWare versions. I hope it never happens.
Now that RHAT has to be RHAT, the name of the game is keeping and increasing that shareholder happiness.
1.) Buying SCO, if the analysts like it, may give an uptick.
2.) The enevitable layoffs that would hit accounting/administration/marketing provide an uptick (From the "Stock in the dulldrums? Announce a layoff!" school of increasing stock price)
3.) Maybe the chance to be profitable without increasing the price of the distribution another $30 provides another uptick.
4.) A west coast presence (SCO has a pretty nice campus).
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
Wow, a thoughtful question! What are you doing on /. ;-) No, I don't think that programmers will starve, and I don't think that cheap software is bad. I buy commercial software from time to time, but nothing I write is ever distributed outside my company, so cheap software benefits me and doesn't cut into my cash flow. I figure that most coders are developing internal apps and are thus in the same boat as me. Cheap software just means that software companies won't turn their employees into overnight millionaires. That's fine with me, I can't imagine sympathizing with someone pulling down 70K/yr just because his stock options won't let him retire at 30.
--Shoeboy
Yeah. Suse should do it.
However, no matter how good Troll developers are ( and they are really good !) Qt is not a recipe to beat MS on the dekstop. Qt can be only as fast as underlying graphics architecture allows it to be and right now XFree still can't come even close to performance offered by profesionally written graphic card drivers on Win platform.
Linux, like HP-UX, SCO Unixware, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other operating systems, is an operating system designed to meet the POSIX and Unix standards. The history of the code is irrelevant--what it does is what matters. If you don't believe me, ask the company that holds the Unix trademark.
To receive the legal right to call Linux "Unix," all that would need to be done is pay some company to certify that it meets the latest Unix standard as published by The Open Group. This simply requires money to pay for the proceedure, and developers to fix any problems encountered in the certification process. (Unfortunately, the Unix branding would probably only apply to a particular release of a particular distribution.)
I haven't looked at the standard myself, but I doubt there's much there that Linux doesn't have. Oh, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the commercial Unixes haven't bothered with actual Unix branding. Perhaps we should check to see if Solaris and HP-UX are really "Unix-like operating systems."
OK, it may be I am impressed with SGI, but I think if red hat is going to chunker out a bunch of cash, they should buy SGI.
... and.... and .... etc were all at red hat's disposal.
And they can do it:
SGI
Red Hat
SCO
Red hat is values at some 5 billion (most likely a large chunk of which is 'liquid') while SGI is around 2 billion. Imagine if all of SGIs technologies and manufacturing and research and
Screw SCO (although for the price it may not be a bad idea), but SGI would rock. Oh yeah, and I do agree that QT, APLIX and otehrs would be a good buy, too. Maybe better than SGI considering what is really wrong with linux is not the OS (it is great) but the fact that there isn't a "Killer App" for people to choose OVER microsoft. Until Linux gets an app that MS can't do, no one "will be fired for buying MS."
Shoot: the preview didn't work right. The SGI thestreet.com page is at:u otes?tkr=SGI
http://quote.thestreet.com/cgi-bin/texis/StockQ
or:
SGI
There are a lot of good ideas in that piece beyond just the purchase of SCO. (And if folks would read the article instead of trying to grab 'first post' they'd know what SCO was.) Whether Red Hat acts on any of them (and who knows, RHAT may have already been thinking about some of them) remains to be seen.
One thing, I believe Microsoft still owns about a 10% position in SCO (as do a couple of other companies - AT&T?). Wonder if they'd be willing to sell it, and with what attached strings?
-- Alastair
From everyone I've talked to, the SCO UNIX is just plain dreadful. I'd say, buy SCO, "borg" their good technology and release it under the GPL, and shitcan the rest.
Wheee! Thats actually a really good idea. Buy up a bunch of commercial software companies, and release the code under GPL. Talk about ironic.
Given that *TODAY* the Linux users can't agree on what version of linux is worth porting to, and which one is not, why would buying SCO help anyone? SCO's assets are protected IP, and a de-valuating IP, IMNSHO.
(VARBusiness did a poll back 5 years ago about SCO. 80% of the people who answered said they would not get 'in bed' with SCO again, if they had to do it all over again.)
And really, the vendors doing the ports of code to 'linux' are not the ones to blame for the 'we only support redhat linux' problem. It is **YOU** the consumer of shrink-wrapped binaries. Are **YOU*** asking for binaries that will run on *ANY* Linux-compatible system, be it redhat, suse, debian, SCO, Solaris, BSD etc or are you just saying 'port to linux', and then throw in that you are running redhat? (Hint: today you do have a LSB - its called the compatibility modes of SCO/Solaris/BSD. If it runs there, it will run anywhere.)
If **YOU** the consumer of shrink-wrapped linux binaries don't get your act together...then the 'linux' who has the most ports done to it will be the official 'linux', in the eyes of the economic world.
Okay, I can understand the draw torwards purchasing SCO. Its the rest of the article that doesn't make sense. Almost every other paragraph says something to the effect of "This isn't where you'll be making revenue." If they are a company, then isn't revenue part of what the want? The portal, sounds good, but no money in it. RHADL needs to decide what they are going to do, but RedHat needs to keep away from funnelling all there money into the development labs. Maybe they should try advertising? I've seen some RedHat ads, but mainly on websites, or in Linux orientated mags, and lets be honest, if your reading a Linux mag, you probably know what RedHat is. Maybe RH should try and get some commercial spots on something like ZDTV (and if they have already, please forgive me, I don't get the channel (unfortunately)). Thats just one thought on what they should do with the money, there are more. But I definately would encourage RH to not spend it all on developement... something about all your eggs in one basket. Of course, thats just my opinion, I could be wrong (but I doubt it)
This looks like another major conflict of interest to me. Will the Slashdot demigods start censoring comments that dare to criticize RedHat?
Then again, this site has never been a source of unbiased information.
Dear Mr. Young and the Red Hat, Inc. Board of Directors,
Your recent, wildly successful, IPO has shown, to the joy of Linux fans everywhere, that Wall Street investors are smoking crack. Linux is destined to lower profit margins on software sales for everyone, but investors still see you as a potential gold mine. Now is the time to leverage your core buisness asset of crack smoking investors. As crack and glass pipe supplies have been drastically lowered during your IPO you need to invest in entities that will ensure an adequate supply of crack cocaine for future stock growth. Allow me to suggest the nation of Columbia.
Acquisitions: There are occasional rumors that Red Hat would consider buying a small european nation such as Luxembourg with its newfound wealth. Bad idea. Who owns Luxembourg? Who do you write the check to.
Instead, and this is key: buy Columbia from the Medelin cartel. This will provide a sufficient amount of coca plants to fuel irrational investor exuberance into the next millenium. What does this bring you?
Equatorial climates and loads of coke. What better way to enjoy your wealth?
Columbia will also give you easy access to Peru's shining path guerillas. These rebels are brutal fanatics, just like linux users. Imagine unleashing a horde trained jungle warriors in the midst of Redmond. Instant coup de etat and you're the CEO of Microsoft! Then you can let your investors snort cocaine off the top of Steve Ballmers glistening scalp. What a way to build market enthusiasm.
Revenue. IPO money is great, but the real money is in narcotics smuggling. You currently only have 10 million in revenue. That's paltry compared to the amount you could make by cornering the market on coke.
CIA contacts. That's right, once you're a major player in the drug arena, the government will bend over backwards for you. They need the drugs for controling inner city unrest and will gladly charge mandrake and debian with antitrust suits just to keep the supply going.
Human capital. Linux programmers are cool to have around, but what company can afford to be without mules? You can use the cartel's drug runners to swallow encryption algorithms and smuggle them out of the country. This will allow you to be the only US software company with real encryption.
Buy Columbia from the drug lords, it just makes sense.
--Shoeboy
*THINK* about it before you open your mouth. SCO is going to die soon, but there are diamonds in the rough of their OS. Proprietary diamonds that PHBs like. Diamonds that can be bought and GPL'ed and improved upon. The guys at RH are still smart enough to throw the crap away and keep the good stuff. With ownership of SCO IP it would be trivial to insure complete binary cross-compatibility, and move a whole bunch of Sad, SAD SCO boxen over to Linux. :) The Linux SOTA would be knocked up a serious notch in a few months. The employee base is also very attractive. "Total Solutions" is serious business. The linux community is like a family. Families are reactionary units, that are strongly resistant to change. If Dad tries to go on a diet, Mom, Jr. and Sis will most likely do whatever they can to make the man eat and stay fat. This is just human nature. They don't know if a skinny dad will be different, maybe less fun, maybe he'll run off with a new, skinny mom... We need to resist these knee-jerk reactions "SCO is Bad." "RedHat can't do that." Blah Blah Blah. It's an adult world out there. And Linux has grown up. Now it's our turn. Anonymous 'cause I don't like people. Some guy named Joe.
SCO's undeserved reputation among punks stems primarily from one factor. Early junior hackers had a hard time configuring and building free software under SCO because they couldn't figure out its compiler tool chain. SCO used a Microsoft derived tool chain which worked slightly different than the standard Unix C compiler. So instead of blaming their own ignorance, they blamed SCO.
Despite what college kids think, SCO is highly respected in the business world. Sure, there are other good Unix versions around too--Linux, AIX, Solaris, and so on. But SCO has been a very reliable mainstay of this industry for many, many, years. It's time to learn respect for this trusted senior partner of the Unix world.
Most tech companies buy stock with stock, so 1. is irrelevant. For 2., a dollar invested in SCOC in the summer of 93 is worth less than a dollar today. The same dollar invested in the S&P500 is worth about 3 dollars today. Maybe the insiders aren't so happy about that ....
I'm not sure why but I've always had a bad taste for them, you can't crush them if you buy them.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
Why wouldn't RHAT buy Corel?
Actually, I was going to write something about this in the original article. I love Qt and would really like, at the very least, for them to release a low-cost/free version for commercial development on Unix/Linux, but keep charging for the cross-platform version (of course, LGPL all around would be even better for the consumers, but they're still a business).
It seemed, however, that one of the other Linux distributors would probably be better suited to make this move. It would be pretty awkward for RedHat to abruptly drop GNOME/GTK right now, but if they didn't move to Qt as their primary platform, it wouldn't be a very good investment.
Still, something has to give with the current Qt licensing system. It's ridiculous to charge $1500 per developer for a widget set, even if it is fantastic. How much is MS Visual Studio Pro now? $750? And companies with an absolute focus on cross platform capability can always settle for Java for free, despite its faults. There you get a large, skilled developer base and your choice of many IDEs. If Troll-Tech (or their future owner) doesn't wise up in the next year, they'll rapidly be made irrelevant in the commercial markets when Swing and fast JVM's really become common.
--JRZ
> ..with the exception that you don't need to go through a ton of menu options to compile the kernel (which compiles a damn sight faster than the Linux kernel).
What you are doing on SCO is re-linking the kernel, NOT recompiling it - the drivers and the kernel core are shipped as binary modules. I am not completely familiar with what all happens when you relink on SCO, but I believe there are some modules that are re-compiled. All these hold are the configuration information you can edit - basically a bunch of constants and data areas, no code to speak of. Its considerably less work than compiling the source for the entire kernel and all the drivers.
I think it might be handy to have a similar mechanism for tweaking settings on an already compiled set of Linux kernel object modules, but it would involve a considerable reorganization of the code and kernel build process, for a limited benefit.
Cheers
Eric
If Red Hat wants to be "the" one you are right, they will need to add to their lineup. The true bells and whistles they will need are the RAD tools. This scenario is already playing itself out in the public markets( see Motorola paying up for Metrowerks to get their CodeWarrior tool). Logic would dicate then that Red Hat would want to buy the companies with the best tools. Having just returned from the recent expo I saw a handful of RAD tool companies, but the one that stood head and shoulders above the rest in my opinion (as well as others as is evidenced by their winning the "Best Tool Company" award )was Omnis Technology. Omnis "Web Client" enables you to build a web-enabled solution rapidly without writing code in Java. In a demonstration at the show, they demonstrated an application and web-enabled it within five minutes without writing a line of code in Java or HTML. It is to my knowledge the only environment which one can write and deploy in any platform without any tweaking of code at all. Further it can access all databases. I would think Red Hat would be interested in a company like this, with a non-existent market cap, to get their RAD tools.
Yes, this is really really one of the things that Redhat should do ! Gnome is looking wonderful these days :) Maybe they should hire more people to help translate and work on the Gnome Workshop components to. One thing that we all need is a real nice groupware server(like Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino). I belive that the Gnomers are working on this, also is the comapany "International Gnome Support" with Miguel and others in it. The product should let you share adresslists contacts, calendars etc. Linux NEED a GPL'd soultion to this ! Also they could checkout the Lithium project - jw.themes.org - that will proboly be a nice product when its ready (well, it works already :) /Myrridin
They'd have to change the acronym. Linux Is NOW UniX. I s'pose you could call it Liux, but that souds/looks stupid, and doesn't fit in with Linus's name.
nt
I would like to know what lead you to say that SCO hasn't been doing well lately? I have seen no indication. The stock has hit a 52 week high recently and they had a good last quarter.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
Once upon a time, USL owned the Unix trademark and System V source code. They were bought by Novell in its expansion period, who subsequently sold its unix assets to SCO during its contraction period.
So SCO owns the Unix trademark and System V source code (or have they done something with it since then?).
Buy SCO, release System V under GPL, and brand Linux the only official Unix!
Red Hat needs some proprietary software to add value to their basic Linux setup. With Sun buying StarOffice, Red Hat should counter with "Red Hat" Applixware. They shouldn't pay too much for it though, they *SHOULD* spend their new investments on developing Linux and marketing Linux. There value is BRAND NAME RECOGNITION. Any clown can slap together a Linux distribution, there's only going to be two or three quality Linux integrator/distributors. Red Hat is #1 n Linux.
Sorry, my mistake, you are right the kernel is just re-linked, not fully compiled as I suggested. And the idea that Linux does a similar thing is a good one, but as you say this would require a lot of work. It would be nice though.
Tom.
Dont have a go at me, blame the computer!
The point is finding out who has code that will most benefit Linux that Redhat can buy.
You would be surprised how many old SCO (3.2v4.2) installations are out there, in small business enviroments. Small doctor's offices, small retail stores for POS systems, etc. Many of these systems are not getting upgraded for Y2K, even though they should. Many of the small businesses that I see are just ignorant of the issues, or are hoping they won't get hit too badly. (Keep in mind when I say "small business", I mean a operation with less than 10 or 15 people). I see a market in sites that could be upgraded from SCO to Linux. In most cases, the upgrade is pretty painless because of iBCS, and Linux is priced right compared to UnixWare, especially for the small outfits. I am working with one larger site now (125+ employees) that went to Linux mostly because SCO wanted over $10,000 to upgrade them to UnixWare 7 for the number of user licenses. It would be really neat if Red Hat bought SCO -- what a perfect market to exploit, and a quick way to advance towards World Domination. SCO does have some good technologies that businesses want that Linux needs now, like fault tolerant clustering, and support for ridiculous amounts of RAM on Intel machines. They have a fully NT compatible PDC implimention for SCO, which I'm sure the Samba guys could use (if only for hints on some of the hidden details yet to be reversed engineered out of NT). But I would be shocked if it actually happened....
If you are the sole copyright owner, you don't have to abide by your own license, and you can change it at will.
If redhat bought all rights to QT, they could GPL it.
If they are to buy anything, the first thing they should buy is Troll Tech! Then they can release Qt under the GPL which would solve a lot of issues with the commercial use of KDE.
While I think you are correct that SCO owns some of the Unix source code, the trademark is held by The Open Group. TOG has been licensing Unix branding for several years.
Disclaimer: I am a former employee of The Open Group, back when it actually did things more interesting than branding and standards.
Long ago, Microsoft thought they knew how to write a Unix Operating System. They made something called Xenix. It sucked, and this made Microsoft sad. Then Bell Labs released the code to Unix. This made microsoft mad. So they branched of their Xenix division. Thus SCO was formed. Microsoft still owns a large part of SCO, if I'm not mistaken.
Supporting Legacy Systems
Buying SCO you'd have to deal with all the bagage of supporting UNIXWARE and their existing customers. One of the great things about RedHat right now is that it doesn't have this huge load of bagage it has to deal with. They can stay focused on Linux.
Besides, who'd wanna buy a UNIX that sells the TCP/IP stack as a seperate product?? blah.
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!