OT: SCO Forum

[D . Thomas Podnar]

On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 03:12:20PM -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 22, 2006, D. Thomas Podnar wrote:
> >On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 12:26:11PM -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
> ...
> >> 
> >> I wonder if the vendors will outnumber the attendees this year.
> >> 
> >> Bill
> >
> >I suspect they won't, as always, else I wouldn't be spending the money.
> >But hey, never pass up a chance for a cheap shot, right ;-)
> 
> There's nothing cheap about my losses on the Caldera/SCO IPO :-).

Sorry to hear that.

> Obviously you think that spending the time and resources to attend it is
> worth it for Microlite's business.  Certainly you see a much wider picture
> of existing SCO users than I do.

It still represents a significant portion of my business.

> 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.

You've got the Groklaw line down pretty well. Take a small fact here or
there and twist it into a greater "truth". Then repeat, repeat, repeat
until everyone believes it.

Whatever your differences with SCO, you're smarter than that.

> 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.

That's ok. To each his own. You make money where you can. Which is exactly
what SCO resellers do when they re-invest in the knowledge that got them
where they are. The modern reseller deploys UNIX, Linux, and even Windows
and knows what each are best suited for and how to combine them to serve
their clients.

We are OS agnostics. We support UNIX and Linux because that's what sells.
It is MUCH harder to support Linux at our level, as there is no such
things as one "Linux". It's a moving target.

In our business, we use Linux, UNIX, and Windows, each in places where
it is best suited.

> The number of SCO customers we support is asymptotically approaching zero.
> I'm in the midst of converting our last customer running Encore/IMPACT MRP
> software from OpenServer to Linux which will leave a couple of companies
> that we occassionally help, and one where the business will be shut down
> when the owner retires (he's 81 now), and has no desire to spend money to
> upgrade.

That's fine. 

> Bill

Tom