Re: SCO and Linux, was Re: SuckerForum 2004

From: Tony Lawrence (pcunix_at_gmail.com)
Date: 07/31/04

  • Next message: Bill Vermillion: "Re: SCO and Linux, was Re: SuckerForum 2004" 
    Date: 31 Jul 2004 14:22:20 -0700

    Bill Campbell wrote:

    >
    > Business application developers don't want bleeding edge, they want
    stable
    > platforms on which they can build their applications, and the
    application
    > developers often don't want to have to deal with a moving target.
    None of
    > the more innovative Unix vendors that were present at the time have
    > survived, and I have a hard time remembering their names.

    You could look back in the newsgroup. A lot of them were telling us
    how much SCO sucked and why :-)

    ..

    > SCO built their business by providing stable, if boring, platforms
    that
    > were well suited for mission-critical accounting and business
    applications.
    > IHMO their main strength beyond reliability was that they had a
    pretty good
    > network of resellers, and applications developers who built the
    systems
    > that Just Worked(tm) without a lot of flash or risk.

    Which unfortunately is a problem for Linux. The constantly shifting
    ground makes development difficult. We already have several apps that
    have frozen on fairly old versions of Linux because of this. Too much
    change, too fast.

    >
    > I think the beginning of the end for SCO was when they first went
    public,
    > and the brokers and bean counters took over the top management of the
    > company.

    Some firms get the bean counters and prosper, but my bet is that it's
    more "in spite of" than "because of".

    >That was probably the point when SCO shifted focus from the
    > small-to-medium (SMB) business market, supported by their reseller
    network,
    > to try to chase the high-end market dominated by Sun, NCR, and IBM.
    >
    > Shortly after Caldera was formed, they made a concerted effort to go
    after
    > the SCO reseller channel (Celestial became Caldera resellers very
    early in
    > the process in 1994 or early 1995). Caldera was aiming for the
    boring,
    > commercial market for Linux that was SCO's bread and butter (which
    was why
    > I went with Caldera rather than Red Hat or other Linux distributions
    which
    > tended to be on the bleeding edge). SCO was busy going after the big
    > ticket market, and was in the process of abandoning their established
    > reseller and education channels, leaving the SMB market behind.
    >
    > By the time Caldera purchased SCO, SCO's independent reseller and
    education
    > channels had been decimated. SCO had some pretty decent support and
    > development contracts with companies like NCR to do Unix work
    allowing the
    > other companies to concentrate their efforts in other places, but SCO
    had
    > fallen way behind Linux in the rising Internet space.

    That's a good summary, Bill. You could add the salt and explain how
    pissed off the small resellers were at being abandoned..

    >
    > ...
    > >There's nothing that runs on the old SCO OS' that wouldn't run
    better
    > >(after recompilation of course) on Linux. This is a fact.
    >
    > There are some applications that are in daily use on SCO platforms
    where
    > the source code is no longer available, and are running 80286 code
    which
    > isn't supported by iBCS/abi. These still run on OpenServer, and are
    > critical to the applications. The companies running them are often
    fairly
    > small, and don't have the budget to rewrite the systems from scratch.
    > These companies don't care about computer technology, they just want
    to
    > have something that works reliably with a minimum of fuss and bother.
    I
    > have one customer who's running OpenServer, and just wants things to
    keep
    > running until he and his wife retire and close the business. Another
    is
    > still running Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 dating back to 1998 or so, and
    probably
    > won't update until his hardware falls dead on the floor.

    We keep telling these zealots this, but they don't listen..

    One of the reasons people don't port to Linux is the constant change I
    mentioned above. I work with a reseller who sells a little
    Counterpoint on Linux - they have OSR5, Unixware and Netware versions,
    and list RedHat Linux specifically. All of our installs have been 7.x;
    I don't know if the darn thing runs above that. Another app I sell is
    the Mitel (old E-Smith) mail server; that's stuck on 7.3 RH. They are
    hardly the only ones:
    http://www.cadence.com/support/computing/32bit.aspx - notice that SOME
    products have Redhat 8 versions, but many do not.

    Vendors like Microlite and Lonetar are constantly fighting the shifting
    Linux sands.

    Small proprietary apps often don't have the budget to keep up.

    That's NOT meant to be an indictment of Linux - there are reasons for
    change, and other aspects of the market demand it. But it does affect
    the smaller folks. 

    --
Tony Lawrence
  • Next message: Bill Vermillion: "Re: SCO and Linux, was Re: SuckerForum 2004"