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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
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??
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:
$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...
Here's the actual numbers:
......................................... 4,741,750 13.8%
Common stock owned:
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
From www.edgar-online.com, proxy statement for SCOC, Jan 21 1999.
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-
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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
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
Actually, Linux is not POSIX certified. There's some minor details I don't fully understand that make it not be POSIX compliant.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Incorrect. Microsoft doesn't anything near 30%+ of SCO. The last time SCO dealt with Microsoft was in the late 80's with MS XENIX. Over the past couple of years SCO has done whatever possible to distance themselves from Microsoft. One major accomplishment was to remove all XENIX legacy compatibility from SCO products, so that paying licensing fees to MS could be terminated. Microsoft does still hold stock in SCO, but nowhere near the level you mentioned. Microsoft has no say in the things that SCO does. End of story.
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
SCO is the Santa Cruz Operation. If you had read the entire article in question, you would have picked up that SCO is one of the foremost Unix makers in the world. Their address (SCO.COM) might have helped a little, but most of us who have been around for some time have come to know SCO on some level. Their Unixware 7.0 and OpenServer are some of the highest (if not THE highest) selling Unix variants on the market. They also have a lot of clout with the OpenGroup (see X.ORG).
Hope this satisfies your "first post" question.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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 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.
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!