OT: Question re: SCO Use

[Fairlight]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 07:29:57PM -0400, Jay Ashworth, the prominent pundit,
witicized:
> > I can understand the legacy systems - that makes sense.  But aren't 
> > people currently deploying SCO boxes?  Is it because their application 
> > is tied to other apps that run only on SCO?  (As the two that you 
> > described below.)
> 
> I dunno; I don't know that there are many people on here deploying new
> installs of SCO: certainly it's been almost 5 years since we put one
> out.

To hear Brian White tell it, Aljex is still deploying SCO, and prefers
doing so to deploying linux.  At least last he spoke when I didn't have
him /dev/null'd.  :)

IMHO, SCO is a PITA.  (Whoa, acronym overload!).  Even in the OSR5 series,
which is -closer- to SVR4 but not close enough, it feels top-heavy,
sluggish, and doesn't perform so well on equivalent hardware.  Granted,
linux has gotten more sluggish--a 2.4 kernel flat-out runs slower than a
2.2 kernel.  It's still faster than SCO in every instance I can pin down.

But speed aside, you can bring up scalability, etc.  That might all be
valid.  There's just one niggling thing that nobody ever seems to bloody
talk about:  Applications.  They talk about it in linux camps as the reason
why linux isn't a Windows-killer.  But they never talk about it in SCO
circles that I've seen.

And porting things to SCO is, quite frankly, a royal PITA most times.  It's
certainly doable--I've done enough myself.  But let's just say that I'll
never port some software (say, any perl app that uses Curses.pm that needs
panels) because the software just WILL NOT FLY on it.  SCO themselves seem
to be the only ones capable of making a perl compilation on the system.
When I did it, out of the box, it failed on 5.6, and when I tried again on
5.8.3 or so, it compiled but failed 80%+ of its self-tests.  And this is a
package that compiles pretty much out of the box on almost anything.  And
even with SCO's perl compile working, if you need XS modules (ones compiled
around C libraries), you have about a 20% chance of them working, even now.
It got better, but it's not right.  I think the difference may be the lack
of the official devkit on the last, but that's because (before recently,
when John told me what he paid for his), the devkit was exhorbitantly
priced.

But what's out there for SCO besides fP and a handful of other miscellenia?
Not much, IMHO.  I dunno if they even make WP for it anymore.  Lotus pretty
much folded their product, didn't they?  Adobe never had PhotoShop, but
they did have PageMaker--then yanked it.  There were a handful of other
commercial apps ported.  All of them about 30-75% more expensive than their
equivalent versions on other platforms, and a lot of them fell into the
drink as ports.  You could never get a -current- Netscape for SCO because a
long time back they seemed to take it under their wing and release their
own.  This had the result of sticking you with 3.2 while 4.76 was out
already.  It was the same way for years.  I'm not even sure there's a
Netscape for SCO now, although I suspect if you fill 50 zillion prereqs
that near an act of deism, you can compile Mozilla of some flavour.

So what's the point?  It'd make the same case for SCO as it supposedly has
for linux.  Except linux is gaining ground here.  About the only thing SCO
may have had going for them there was Merge, but WINE is supposed to be far
more mature, and there's always VMWare, which is supposed to be -really-
good, and was always more mature than Wine anyway from what people tell me.

I'd agree with Jay--legacy and inertia.  And in the business world of
stuffed suits, a brand name that the current company didn't -earn-...they
bought it, not earned it.  This isn't even as good as the company I learned
to really dislike (bordering on detest) back in the mid-90's.  They're not
even -that- good.  Apparently hiring lawyers is easier than engineering
decent software that people will actually want to use.  Not to say they
don't have good engineers on-staff.  They do.  Their management is HUA,
though, IMHO.

mark->
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