SEO

Well according to the following account up at Groklaw by an attendee
at a pitstop of SCO's current travelling circus roadshow, SCO don't
just claim to own "Ancient UNIX" code - they're still using it!

I knew SCO's OS' were pretty backward, but even I didn't believe they
still lacked PAM, 2 gig+ files and various other "innovations" from
the early 90's. Why does anyone buy this junk??! I guess it shows just
how much of the company cashflow has been diverted away from the
development staff, and into the ever-growing legal teams. It's
astonishing to think that SCO believe Linux couldn't have become the
World leading *NIX without their scabby old code from the 70's. If
Linux managed to implement NFS over TCP then why couldn't SCO, with
their priceless, jealously guarded super-duper source code? ;-)


Copied From:

http://www.groklaw.com/article.php?s...31007204535495


Begin paste:---

First City-to-City SCO Show Report Is In, and Yes, It's HP-Sponsored

Tuesday, October 07 2003 @ 08:45 PM EDT

A guy in Canada is nice enough to fill us in on the SCO Show from its
first stop there:
"It was mostly a room full of SCO resellers. And they were not too big
on having a love in. Nothing hostile, however not one positive comment
for the morning's session. During the 'we be so profitable' section of
the spiel, one reseller in the crowd asked 'where does the money come
from?' The response was largely a pointer to the SCO source
initiative. The response? 'What you are profitable in will not make me
profitable.' Wow. That was good. One raised the points that this
quibble is hurting his business. SCO's stance is that they'd love to
settle this tomorrow (har har). Stance not bought by aforementioned
reseller - the paraphrased retort was 'litigation will resolve nothing
that I am interested in. SCO needs to adapt to the times, or it will
perish'. Wow wow. People seem to get this. I like it.

"I now know how retro SCOs OSes are. Riotous, riotous stuff. How they
had the ya-yas to declare Linux an infant OS in need of their IP is
beyond me. Upcoming features? PAM. files larger than 2 gigs. NFS over
TCP. The 80's called, they want their features back. NTPv4 was a
listed big feature on a slide of 10 to 15 upcoming enhancements. How
does an NTP enhancement get mentioned as a 'big' feature? Wow. I never
knew it was this bad. Maybe I should lend my old 486 running Debian
from '97 to Pizza Hut - it sounds like they could use the upgrade.
Even the guy presenting was a leelte embarrassed by the state of the
OS. When mentioning PAM support his comment was "finally!". A crowd
member picked up on this & asked "when you say 'PAM - finally!', who
are you implying you are behind?". The response was pretty generic,
other than to point out that rigorous certification testing was a
portion of the delay. Also of note was the volume of OpenSource
software in the box - OpenSSL/SSH, Apache, Samba, CUPS, Gimp-print,
bash ... you name it. Maybe their idea of building a super-OS involves
a fistful of RPMs. He tried to convey his amazement at the fantastic
future of UnixWare by telling the crowd that they would someday be
able to print in colour from their colour printer (thanks to features
in gimp-print)."

I don't want to burst any SCO bubbles, but if McBride is right when he
said, "At the end of the day, the GPL is not about making software
free; it's about destroying value," why then, are is SCO distributing
Samba and the Gimp, both GPL'd software?

Guess how many people showed up? Less than 20. That left more than 40
seats empty. And yes, HP is a sponsor, he says. A Groklaw reader,
mdchaney, called Blake Stowell today, and he confirmed:

"I just called Blake Stowell at SCO and asked if HP was sponsoring the
road show. He said that they definitely were. I asked why their name
wasn't on the web site. His response was that they had asked to have
it removed from the web site, but they were definitely still a
sponsor. HP just lost a laptop sale."

If you're curious about just how behind the times System V was in 2001
compared to other UNIX versions, you might find this "2001 UNIX
Function Review" of interest, available as either a pdf or as html.
They came in dead last, comparing Solaris 8, HP-UX 11i, Tru64 UNIX
5.1, AIX 4.3.3, and UnixWare 7.1.1. On page two of the document,
comparing scalability, it says this about UnixWare:


End paste:---
--
FyRE < "War: The way Americans learn geography" >

FyRE <FyRE@toktik.demon.ku.oc.x> wrote in message news:<qdm8ovgca4bsavcauaf9ah4r0joqp1urse@4ax.com>. ..
>
> I knew SCO's OS' were pretty backward, but even I didn't believe they
> still lacked PAM, 2 gig+ files and various other "innovations" from
> the early 90's. [...]

Well, the Groklaw account was obviously from someone with an axe
to grind. And in places it conflates SCO's two OS products, UnixWare
and OpenServer. UnixWare generally has more advanced technology
than OpenServer (it's UnixWare that's the subject of the IP disputes).

So for example >2Gb files is a feature that UnixWare has had for
many years now, but that OpenServer has lacked. Next year's
"Legend" release of OpenServer will remedy that.

In other cases, yes UnixWare has been missing features that other OSes
have. I think most SCO resellers, partners, etc. would agree that the
SCO->Caldera->SCO changes of name and direction resulted in lost
UnixWare momentum. PAM is an example of that. So SCO is now adding it in.
(And your objection is?)

These are examples of the ongoing development work that you claim doesn't
exist.

Jonathan Schilling

FyRE <FyRE@toktik.demon.ku.oc.x> wrote:
>Well according to the following account up at Groklaw by an attendee
>at a pitstop of SCO's current travelling circus roadshow, SCO don't
>just claim to own "Ancient UNIX" code - they're still using it!

>I knew SCO's OS' were pretty backward, but even I didn't believe they
>still lacked PAM, 2 gig+ files and various other "innovations" from
>the early 90's. Why does anyone buy this junk??! I guess it shows just

The article was by someone with no understanding of WHY OSR5 has
lacked these features. Aside from technical issues that Bela and
others keep telling us will make it very hard to do, SCO at
one time was trying to phase out OSR5 and push people to Unixware,
which has had large files, large memory models etc. for some time.

That these things will now be added to OSR5 is an indication of it's
value to the folks who use it: they wouldn't let SCO kill it off,
so now they have to add features that should have been put in years
ago but were not because of the planned phase out.

That shows how GOOD OSR5 is, not how backward it is.


--
tony@aplawrence.com Unix/Linux/Mac OS X resources: http://aplawrence.com
Get paid for writing about tech: http://aplawrence.com/publish.html

> That these things will now be added to OSR5 is an indication of it's
> value to the folks who use it: they wouldn't let SCO kill it off,
> so now they have to add features that should have been put in years
> ago but were not because of the planned phase out.
>
> That shows how GOOD OSR5 is, not how backward it is.

I don't know if I would consider the fact that a relic like OSR5 is around
to be a testiment to it's worthiness as a product, but rather proof that
some of these corps who use it have custom designed apps which would cost
them significant amounts of money to port. Why would someone willingly use
an obsolete and overpriced OS when there are plenty of better options out
there otherwise?

On Thu, Oct 09, 2003, David Chait wrote:
>> That these things will now be added to OSR5 is an indication of it's
>> value to the folks who use it: they wouldn't let SCO kill it off,
>> so now they have to add features that should have been put in years
>> ago but were not because of the planned phase out.
>>
>> That shows how GOOD OSR5 is, not how backward it is.
>
>I don't know if I would consider the fact that a relic like OSR5 is around
>to be a testiment to it's worthiness as a product, but rather proof that
>some of these corps who use it have custom designed apps which would cost
>them significant amounts of money to port. Why would someone willingly use
>an obsolete and overpriced OS when there are plenty of better options out
>there otherwise?

Because it works now, and they don't want to spend a lot of money to
``fix'' something that isn't broken.

The vast majority of OpenServer customers are running accounting and
database applications, and perhaps e-mail servers. Their functions are
critical to the operation of the business, and the last thing the business
owner wants to do is have somebody messing around with it. Many of these
businesses will never have a problem with a 2gb file system limit, or any
of the other limitations of OSR5 (hell, they could probably still use their
old Xenix systems if it weren't for the y2k issues).

We still have a half-dozen or so customers who are still running OpenServer
because they have 3rd party applications that aren't supported or won't run
on Linux. I've just put together an OSR 5.0.6 system for one of these who
was running a FilePro application on 3.2v4.2 (ODT 3.0) where the old box
was destroyed in a fire. We have to run it on OSR5 because it has compiled
programs with no source code that are 286 a.out binaries that won't run on
anything else.

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

That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is
the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
--GEORGE ORWELL

"David Chait" <davidc@bonair.stanford.edu> wrote in message news:<bm4rnr$aef$1@news.Stanford.EDU>...
> >
> > That shows how GOOD OSR5 is, not how backward it is.
>
> I don't know if I would consider the fact that a relic like OSR5 is around
> to be a testiment to it's worthiness as a product, [...]
> Why would someone willingly use
> an obsolete and overpriced OS when there are plenty of better options out
> there otherwise?

"Obsolete" is only meaningful relative to intended purpose. For example,
the C programming language is 30 years old and by any measure of modern
programming language design is "obsolete". Yet vendors still ship
C compilers and a significant number of applications are still written
in C. If a language or an OS is the right fit for a job, who cares
if some alternative language or OS has more whiz-bang features?

"Overpriced" is also only meaningful within a total project/product/
ownership cost perspective.

Jonathan Schilling

David Chait <davidc@bonair.stanford.edu> wrote:
>> That these things will now be added to OSR5 is an indication of it's
>> value to the folks who use it: they wouldn't let SCO kill it off,
>> so now they have to add features that should have been put in years
>> ago but were not because of the planned phase out.
>>
>> That shows how GOOD OSR5 is, not how backward it is.

>I don't know if I would consider the fact that a relic like OSR5 is around
>to be a testiment to it's worthiness as a product, but rather proof that
>some of these corps who use it have custom designed apps which would cost
>them significant amounts of money to port. Why would someone willingly use
>an obsolete and overpriced OS when there are plenty of better options out
>there otherwise?

Then why would they pressure SCO to add these features?

--
tony@aplawrence.com Unix/Linux/Mac OS X resources: http://aplawrence.com
Get paid for writing about tech: http://aplawrence.com/publish.html