(from http://aplawrence.com/Blog/B1037.html)

http://www.integratedmar.com/ECL.cfm?item=DLY080304-02 tells of
SCO's plan for their "Diamond" release - the single OS that apparently
will be able to take on either Unixware or OpenServer personalities,
dependent upon the installer's desires - or perhaps even the users
wishes.

SCO has needed this for some time, though most of us are thinking
that it's a little late to be pushing on that barn door. A lot of
the horses are long gone, the rest are spooked, and the world is
switching to those dang horseless carriages to boot.

Aside from all that, let's pretend for a moment that this Linux
stuff all gets sorted out one way or another and SCO still has
customers in 2006. Jeff Hunsaker says (about Diamond)

"It might take the blinders off of partners"

Pardon me, Jeff, but if anyone has had blinders on about markets
and SCO's positioning therein, it hasn't been the partners and
resellers. We aren't the ones who didn't want a free or inexpensive
Unix for home users and students- if that had been available early
on you never would have had to worry about Linux. We aren't the
ones who went chasing after the big elephants with Unixware - we
knew that SCO's market was small to medium business and small
developers. We aren't the ones who told the world that OpenServer
would be discontinued, causing it to quickly lose even more support
from third party developers. Nor were we the ones who steadfastly
ignored the need for businesses to safely connect to the Internet,
have up to date and secure mail etc. until way past "too late".

And finally, we sure as heck were not the ones who decided that
suing IBM and trying to license Linux users was a brilliant idea.

No, Jeff, we aren't the blind ones. Look inward, Jeff. SCO made the
thorny bed it now lies on - against the advice and wishes of your
partners and resellers.

I hope Diamond gets to become reality. I hope that SCO can somehow
repair all the damage it has wrought. I hope.. well, many things.
Mostly I hope for a world not dominated by Microsoft. Whether SCO
is part of that or not is rather unimportant to me.
--
Tony Lawrence
http://aplawrence.com/Lawsuit/

"Tony Lawrence" <pcunix@gmail.com> wrote in message news:<cerbug$7s4@odak26.prod.google.com>...
> (from http://aplawrence.com/Blog/B1037.html)
>
> http://www.integratedmar.com/ECL.cfm?item=DLY080304-02 tells of
> SCO's plan for their "Diamond" release - the single OS that apparently
> will be able to take on either Unixware or OpenServer personalities,
> dependent upon the installer's desires - or perhaps even the users
> wishes.
>
> SCO has needed this for some time, though most of us are thinking
> that it's a little late to be pushing on that barn door.

Yes, in hindsight, the Legend/Diamond approach is probably what
should have been done after SCO acquired Novell UnixWare back
in the mid-90s. I remember talking at SCOForum 96 with a reseller
who did dental applications, who thought Gemini (what became
UnixWare 7) was going to be an SVR4 kernel with an OpenServer
user space, and that's closer to Legend than to what Gemini
actually was.

But alas hindsight is easy ;-)

> [...] Jeff Hunsaker says (about Diamond)
>
> "It might take the blinders off of partners"
>
> Pardon me, Jeff, but if anyone has had blinders on about markets
> and SCO's positioning therein, it hasn't been the partners and
> resellers. We aren't the ones who didn't want a free or inexpensive
> Unix for home users and students- if that had been available early
> on you never would have had to worry about Linux.

Not sure about that -- Linux has other important characteristics
that have made it popular.

> We aren't the
> ones who went chasing after the big elephants with Unixware - we
> knew that SCO's market was small to medium business and small
> developers.

SCO saw the SMB market being threatened by MS and the enterprise
market on commodity hardware as being an wide-open and higher-margin
place to do business. It didn't fully work out, for various reasons,
but I think it was a defensible and reasonable attempt.

> We aren't the ones who told the world that OpenServer
> would be discontinued, causing it to quickly lose even more support
> from third party developers.

Agreed, a big mistake. Names, brands, appearances, look-and-feels,
compatibility, continuity are all important. SCO realizes now that
trying to migrate partners and users from OS A to OS B is counter-
productive to say the least.

That's why Legend and Diamond take the opposite approach: they
ensure that both OpenServer and UnixWare carry on, but look to
improve both while introducing common underlying technology
and thereby reducing internal development costs.

Jonathan Schilling