OT: SCO Forum

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Jun 22, 2006, Fairlight wrote:
>>From inside the gravity well of a singularity, Bill Campbell shouted:
>> 
>> There's nothing cheap about my losses on the Caldera/SCO IPO :-).
>
>Shoulda gone for the RH IPO.  As I recall though, you hate RH.  :)
>Invitation was based on whether you'd submitted a bug to their bugzilla.

The only reason we ``took advantage'' of the Caldera ``Friends and Family''
IPO was that my wife was pissed I had ignored the F&F offer from Red Hat.
If I remember correctly, RH's came out the first day of the first
LinuxForum in San Jose.

...
>> I have a hard time understanding why developers would develop new products
>> for SCO systems, given SCO's past history, destroying their network of
>> Advanced Education Centers and Authorized Resellers, suing their own
>> customers, and seemingly adopting a litigatation vs innovation strategy.
>
>"But it's easier to use than Linux."  I actually had someone tell me that
>the other day.  Sure it was.  Until they wanted the latest (ie., latest
>-developer- version, not SCO-released version) apache, PHP, etc., ad
>nauseum.  Then it costs them.  And actually it's not easier, as they still
>"need" (their word, not mine) Webmin to administer sendmail--what they can
>admin of it.

I'm certainly no stranger to building open source software on SCO systems.
My site, ftp.celestial.com, was considered the definitive source for
compiled open source for SCO systems for years, and was the first reference
on the SCO site for this type of thing.  Given Stallman's penchant for
relating things to GNU, perhaps I was running GNU/Xenix and GNU/OpenServer.

I even have some RPM packages for OpenServer there.

>> I find I can provide systems running on Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X far more
>> easily than I can on SCO.  If SCO systems provided significant advantages
>> in reliability or performance, it might be worth the extra effort to use
>> them, but I certainly haven't seen any reasons to do so for the last 8
>> years or so.
>
>If SCO wasn't a complete nightmare to port to, it might have advantages.
>They must have -really- had to bastardize perl to get it working on OSR5.
>I tried that compile (which I've done many times on 3 other platforms,
>including Solaris, with zero hitches) and the first time it wouldn't
>compile.  The second time I finally convinced it to compile but it failed
>84%+ of its own tests.  I gave up.  And you can't use most XS modules with
>SCO's version.  They fail to load the blib files.  I -think- it's because
>they compile with their own compiler, while the modules are compiled using
>gcc (a vastly outdated gcc, I might add--and one that's buggy).  Their
>devkit isn't even worth getting, as it's not ANSI, and so many things these
>days require ANSI C that it's just...well, pointless.

I took the time to get the OpenPKG portable package managment system
Release 1.3 working on OpenServer several years ago.   I have 167 packages
built for OSR 5.0.6a including perl-5.8.0, python-2.2.2, mysql-3.23.56,
postfix-2.0.3, openssh-3.6.1p2, etc. -- basically most of the tools I use
daily.  It works well enough for my needs so I'm not taking the time to
bring them up to date (I'll spend my time on the OS X version first :-).

Now if somebody wants to pay me to get the current OpenPKG release working
on OpenServer <= 5.0.6a, I'll be glad to tackle the job.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

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