Developers Back IBM in Unix Suit (Wired)

Posted Mar 7, 2003 21:39 UTC (Fri) by cr (guest, #3685) [Link]

Considering the still-building tsunami of community revulsion over the SCO extortion attempt, the other members of UnitedLinux have little time in which to cast off from SCO/Caldera before they're dragged under along with them. How likely are businesses to buy into a distribution that could be attacked and gutted from within and rendered not just unsupported but unavailable at any time, by a member who's proven that they turn cannibal when the hunting's poor?

Posted Mar 8, 2003 1:33 UTC (Sat) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

I remember reading a comparison between sco and slackware back in 1995 - I think it was in infoworld. Their testing showed that slackware was faster, easier to manage and more featureful than the $2600 sco unix -

Back in 1995, IBM had zero interest in linux - IBM's linux moves didn't happen until what, 1998-1999 or so?

If slackware was already considered superior to sco, the argument that only IBM's help could bring linux up to sco's level is very weak.

Posted Mar 8, 2003 1:39 UTC (Sat) by dcoolidge (guest, #1390) [Link]

I hate people/companies that try to make money in court. If your product is good people will use it. I didn't like when sun was trying to get m$ to distribute sun java. Why didn't sco come out of the closet earlier? Scum of the earth Karl Marx called people who take advantage of a system for their own good. SCO of the earth is what we can call companies who do the same.

Posted Mar 8, 2003 21:43 UTC (Sat) by paulsheer (guest, #3925) [Link]

I had a few encounters with SCO that are
amusing and probably reflect the general
cluelessness of the company. Once I posted
to a LUG mailing list that SCO was pretty
useless for just about any task that
most South African companies are currently
buying licenses for. For example, most SCO
deployments began when DOS was around; SCO
is really solid, so these deployments
(sometimes thousands of machines) worked
well, and were never replaced with cheeper
software.

The marketing guy phoned me and ranted on
that SCO was better than any other unix system
on Xeon 4-CPU machines. Of course of all the
thousands of SCO machines that I've overseen
replacement with Linux, none was performance
critical - most were entry-level PC's. So I
asked if he would still recommend SCO over
Linux for an entry level PC - got no proper
answer.

SCO also has the worst development user
interface I could ever imagine - Kind'a
takes me back to my ZX-Spectrum-48k.

SCO is emphatic that they have a full
POSIX implementation. But they forget
they have nothing *more* than a POSIX
implementation. Their X interface is
horrendous. Their C compiler is as user
friendly as ed.

I tried to explain to him what a pain
it was to develop for SCO, and what
a pleasure it was under Linux. I also
tried to explain how backward their
terminal shell's were, how they made
agony of simple administration tasks.
Most importantly, installation is a
killer on SCO when you have 500 machines
to install - of course with Linux/FreeBSD
you can just script an installation to
do repeated installations.

Why didn't SCO port KDE and Gnome and
package a proper desktop with their
machines? Yes, we KNOW there kernel
is totally amazing (sic.) so why not
create the desktop to match?

*Of course* SCO is going out of business.
It began in the Slackware <= 2.0 days.
They have *always* been doomed. However
they still have 10+ years left as a
company because there is so much effort
in switching over legacy SCO systems to
Linux (yes it *is* lots of work migrating
an infrustrature even if it is unix-like).

They should at least try and make the best
of it.