OT: SCO Forum

[D . Thomas Podnar]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 10:55:04AM -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
> 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.

Then you know for sure that SCO, even though smaller, has a hell of a
lot more employees NOT working on litigation than working on it. I know
a lot of SCO people in engineering, marketing, channel sales, etc.

I don't know anybody in the litigation department.

When you said "seemingly adopting a litigatation vs innovation strategy",
you were just shoveling someone elses #$%@.

As for "suing their own customers", give me a break. The Groklaw/Slashdot
lemmings would have you believe that if you ever had a SCO product you
can be sure of getting sued. How stupid is that.

I have clients with OEM agreements. The contracts require quarterly reporting,
and payments. If I stopped getting them from one of my clients, if they
started ignoring me, without formally notifying me that they'd ended the
agreement, I'd consider action.

And if a client started using part of my product in another product, and
I didn't consider that legal per my license agreement with them, I'd
consider action in that case also.

Any business person would.

Working with SCO, as a private company and as a public company under
three regimes, has been a challenge for sure. Disliking them is Ok.
But at least apply a little intellectual honesty and serve up the real
reasons, not the drivel that gets propounded over and over.

> 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.

Agreed.

> 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 :-).

Untruths, half-truths and mis-truths are wrong, no matter where
they come from. 
> 
> >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.

And that's commendable.

> 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.

You use, know, and sell what you know and trust.

The SCO ecosystem survives exactly because of that. While it wasn't the
most modern OS in the world, people understood how to get applications
in great numbers supported on SCO platforms. The cost to change for them
is quite high, 

> 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.

I agree that Novell SuSE is a nice Linux. I just spent the best part of
today working with SuSE 10.1.

For those who care, it is the FIRST Linux I've been able to find to work
well in my all-SATA box, which has been running under SCO OpenServer 6
for more than a year.

I couldn't actually install it from my SATA DVD drive, but it did install
from a USB DVD drive, and now runs my SATA hard drive, tape drive, DVD
and REV drive just fine.

> 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

Tom