OT: SCO Forum

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006, D. Thomas Podnar wrote:
>On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 03:12:20PM -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
...
>> 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.

My views are based on personal knowledge, and from people who have been
heavily involved with SCO for years, not from Groklaw, which I may read two
or three times a month.

I guess it's a matter of opinion, the size of facts, when they're court
filings, depositions, etc.  PJ's comments are interesting, given her
background, but aren't facts, any more than Darl's comments are.

If I had to have an opinion, I would say that expanding a ``small fact'' is
better then repeating a ``big lie'' until everybody believes it (e.g.
Microsoft's being innovative :-).

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

I have no differences with SCO, and have never had any relationship with
SCO other than as an SCO Authorized Reseller from 1988, and one of the
first Caldera Resellers until about four years ago.  I was a co-moderator
on a SCO group on Compuserve, along with JPR, John Esak, and others.

We were Caldera Partners prior to the SCO purchase, exhibiting in their
booth at the first LinuxWorld in San Jose.

Other than being resellers of their products, we have never had any
contracts of business relationships with either the original SCO, Caldera,
or Caldera/SCO.

>> 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.

Unlike Microlite, we're not trying to sell to people who have existing
systems, but we're mostly doing complete systems where we can control the
platform.

I would say I'm pretty much OS agnostic in that we support a variety of
Unix and Linux platforms including Apple's OS X, which we recommend for
most people's desktop systems.

I know it's difficult to deal with moving targets, which is the main reason
we've been using open source software, largely from the GNU project, on the
*nix systems we build, going back to the Xenix days.  This avoids many of
the differences between SCO, Sun, HP, Sequent, Linux.

While we support several different flavours of Unix and Linux, the systems
we build are all on SuSE Linux Enterprise 9 because Novell provides support
over an extended period of time.  We build on Caldera originally because it
was, like SCO Unix, designed to be a stable platform for commercial
applications.

If Windows were reliable, and didn't have fundamental security problems, we
might even support Windows.  If our customers want to use Windows, we can
work with that, but warn them of the security and reliability problems
inherent when Windows machines are put on a network.  When we started
selling our InterRack ISP systems in 1994, build on SCO Unix, and people
asked for Windows, I told them to go to somebody else as there was no way
to build reliable and secure systems on Windows.

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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