Brian wrote:
> Anybody here attending SuckerForum 2004?
>
> Just curious.
>
> Pamela Jones just won an award for her Most Excellent website
*Groklaw* -
> what ever happened to Tony's website? Anybody ever go there?

Are you under some moronic impression that my site is only for SCO Unix
users?

No, you can't be that stupid..

I'll tell you this, Brian: after the SCO crap is over, Groklaw will
most likely be a backwater footnote. I'll still be doing what I've
been doing all along, and that will be true no matter what happens to
SCO or Linux.

Site stats: http://aplawrence.com/advert.html
Pisses you off, doesn't it?



--
Tony Lawrence

On 31 Jul 2004 10:52:47 -0700, "Tony Lawrence" <pcunix@gmail.com>
wrote:

[...]

>Just noticed this from my Analog stats
>(http://aplawrence.com/webstats/) :
>
>reqs: search term
>------: -----------
>17612: linux
>9500: unix
>8817: sco
>5010: perl
>4948: mac

>I'd say aplawrence.com is much more of a Linux site than a SCO site :-)

I'm guessing SCO's web stats see a lot of hits for "Litigious
bastards" for the same reason.

[...]

>But I do think that the loss of SCO can only mean more power for
>Microsoft - it would be another Unix competitor put away forever. The
>ignorant Linzealots will probably laugh hysterically, but that's
>because most of them have no clue as to how successful SCO was in the
>SMB marketplace.

The reason I'm laughing, Tony, is because you seem to think SCO are a
competitor to MS. Never mind the evidence that MS brokered the funding
of SCO to keep them afloat, and are making gleeful use of idiot Darl's
ludicrous rants in their FUD campaigns. MS don't see SCO as a
competitor; they WANT them around, and if they manage to think up some
other way to channel funding to them without landing in court (again)
they'd be all over it.

The only reason old SCO (not the current company) was successful, was
due to them being the ONLY viable *NIX option on cheap PC hardware as
Linux was being born. Unfortunately for them, they decided to sit back
on their laurels and let their ancient OS stagnate while the
competition grew in strength, arrogantly thinking nobody could
challenge them. Once it became obvious that Linux had passed them by
(some years back), they attempted to cobble its superior features into
the creaking old mess that's Openserver/Unixware. When they found that
nobody wanted their overpriced version of Linux, they took the good
old American approach to business "If you can't compete, litigate!".

There's nothing that runs on the old SCO OS' that wouldn't run better
(after recompilation of course) on Linux. This is a fact.

>As to Linux being the future, maybe. That would certainly be nice, but
>it is by no means assured. Microsoft won't give up easily, won't fight
>cleanly, and is absolutely out for the kill.

Yes, but whereas before MS have always aimed for the same target -
putting companies out of business by putting inferior; but free;
versions of their victims products into their OS, or hinting that they
would do so, they don't have that option with Linux. It's already free
;-) Unless MS start paying people to use their software.... hang on,
they already do that though... hmm, but I doubt it's a viable
long-term business strategy...

>There are also other contenders for whatever Unixish space Microsoft
>leaves us to swim in. Mac OS X is steadily gaining ground,

I use OSX at home, but it's not a competitor to MS or Linux for
business use. The G5 hardware is more expensive, and has not fared
well in benchmarks against x86 hardware (for gaming, graphic, audio or
business use).

>and who knows: GNU Hurd may get finished someday.

Unlikely; even if it does, it'll be severely lacking in driver
support, or a development community. The project is mired in internal
politics, and there's no usable testing versions on the horizon.

>Much as I don't care about
>SCO as an entity, neither do I particularly care about Linux. The GNU
>tools are frankly much more important to me than Linux per se is. And,
>for my own personal choice, I choose OS X.

Funnily enough, although I use it, I really do prefer the new KDE
desktop to Apple's interface. Don't get me wrong, OSX is beautiful to
look at, but I just haven't ever warmed to it. The changes Apple made
to Safari (which is based on KDE's KHTML engine) have made it less
usable IMO, and configuration of OSX using a command line is pretty
bizarre as they've gone with a bastardized version of the Windows
registry instead of config files (which are there, but seemingly
unused last time I checked).

>So, as usual, our resident Linzeals cannot distinguish hope from
>reality.

Tony, I can honestly say I have no worries about SCO's ridiculous
legal shenanigans whatsoever. MS and its patents, yes; although
hopefully they'll simply be inconveniences in the future, to be coded
around.
--
FyRE < "War: The way Americans learn geography" >

FyRE wrote:
> The only reason old SCO (not the current company) was successful, was
> due to them being the ONLY viable *NIX option on cheap PC hardware as
> Linux was being born. Unfortunately for them, they decided to sit back
> on their laurels and let their ancient OS stagnate while the
> competition grew in strength, arrogantly thinking nobody could
> challenge them. Once it became obvious that Linux had passed them by
> (some years back), they attempted to cobble its superior features into
> the creaking old mess that's Openserver/Unixware. When they found that
> nobody wanted their overpriced version of Linux, they took the good
> old American approach to business "If you can't compete, litigate!".

Well, you must have been asleep at the wheel then. Because there
was Interactive Unix as well.

The reason SCO "Stagnated" as yo put it, is that it was designed
for business use. Think "reliable" not the "Let's see what new
feature we can add and break something else this week" like Linux
was in the early days. (And to some extent still is.)

I remember reading on this news group all the questions about "How
come Linux has all the drivers for the newest piece of whizzo
hardware that just came out last week, but I can't get it to work
on my SCO box."

Well, that's simple, most people running a bussiness application
are too concerned about make "just because" hardware changes. What
they ARE concerned about is that ANY changes to the system are NOT
going to break it.

Jeff
(The other other one.)




--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin
"A life lived in fear is a life half lived."
Tara Morice as Fran, from the movie "Strictly Ballroom"

On Sat, Jul 31, 2004, FyRE wrote:
>On 31 Jul 2004 10:52:47 -0700, "Tony Lawrence" <pcunix@gmail.com>
>wrote:
>
>[...]
>
.....
>The reason I'm laughing, Tony, is because you seem to think SCO are a
>competitor to MS. Never mind the evidence that MS brokered the funding
>of SCO to keep them afloat, and are making gleeful use of idiot Darl's
>ludicrous rants in their FUD campaigns. MS don't see SCO as a
>competitor; they WANT them around, and if they manage to think up some
>other way to channel funding to them without landing in court (again)
>they'd be all over it.
>
>The only reason old SCO (not the current company) was successful, was
>due to them being the ONLY viable *NIX option on cheap PC hardware...

Actually the main reason that SCO was successful in the '80s, when there
were several competing companies selling *nix for 'x86, was that SCO built
a stable, if boring, version of *ix that was well suited to stable
commercial applications. BTW: Microsoft originally ported Unix to the
Intel platform creating Xenix which also had many features of Berkeley Unix
including the vi editor and csh.

SCO had an agreement with Microsoft at the time to maintain Xenix for most
vendors other than IBM with Microsoft maintaining and supporting it for IBM
and a couple of other major hardware vendors. The original Tandy Xenix for
their '68000 based machines were done by Microsoft, but SCO took up
development and support of the Tandy versions shortly after that (Tandy
also had some pretty competent Xenix developers in the early to mid '80s as
well such as Frank Durda, and Tudor Apmadoc).

Business application developers don't want bleeding edge, they want stable
platforms on which they can build their applications, and the application
developers often don't want to have to deal with a moving target. None of
the more innovative Unix vendors that were present at the time have
survived, and I have a hard time remembering their names.

I first met Doug Michels, co-founder of SCO, in 1984 or 1985 when I was on
the board of directors of TCBUG (Tandy Computer Business Users Group), and
I was developing products on Xenix, a *nix system that ran on the Tandy
Model 16/6000, and ported to the x86 platforms by Microsoft.

Doug bought dinner for all the board members at that meeting, and I told
him I thought SCO was nuts developing for the x68 platforms when the
Motorola 68000 systems were far superior -- and most of my fellow board
members agreed with me. Years later, I had to eat a bit of crow, and tell
Doug that I had been mistaken, and that he was right. Even though the
Intel x86 chips were inferior to the Motorola, the IBM connection pushed
the PCs into the market place.

SCO built their business by providing stable, if boring, platforms that
were well suited for mission-critical accounting and business applications.
IHMO their main strength beyond reliability was that they had a pretty good
network of resellers, and applications developers who built the systems
that Just Worked(tm) without a lot of flash or risk.

I think the beginning of the end for SCO was when they first went public,
and the brokers and bean counters took over the top management of the
company. That was probably the point when SCO shifted focus from the
small-to-medium (SMB) business market, supported by their reseller network,
to try to chase the high-end market dominated by Sun, NCR, and IBM.

Shortly after Caldera was formed, they made a concerted effort to go after
the SCO reseller channel (Celestial became Caldera resellers very early in
the process in 1994 or early 1995). Caldera was aiming for the boring,
commercial market for Linux that was SCO's bread and butter (which was why
I went with Caldera rather than Red Hat or other Linux distributions which
tended to be on the bleeding edge). SCO was busy going after the big
ticket market, and was in the process of abandoning their established
reseller and education channels, leaving the SMB market behind.

By the time Caldera purchased SCO, SCO's independent reseller and education
channels had been decimated. SCO had some pretty decent support and
development contracts with companies like NCR to do Unix work allowing the
other companies to concentrate their efforts in other places, but SCO had
fallen way behind Linux in the rising Internet space.

....
>There's nothing that runs on the old SCO OS' that wouldn't run better
>(after recompilation of course) on Linux. This is a fact.

There are some applications that are in daily use on SCO platforms where
the source code is no longer available, and are running 80286 code which
isn't supported by iBCS/abi. These still run on OpenServer, and are
critical to the applications. The companies running them are often fairly
small, and don't have the budget to rewrite the systems from scratch.
These companies don't care about computer technology, they just want to
have something that works reliably with a minimum of fuss and bother. I
have one customer who's running OpenServer, and just wants things to keep
running until he and his wife retire and close the business. Another is
still running Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 dating back to 1998 or so, and probably
won't update until his hardware falls dead on the floor.

....
>>There are also other contenders for whatever Unixish space Microsoft
>>leaves us to swim in. Mac OS X is steadily gaining ground,
>
>I use OSX at home, but it's not a competitor to MS or Linux for
>business use. The G5 hardware is more expensive, and has not fared
>well in benchmarks against x86 hardware (for gaming, graphic, audio or
>business use).

Apple is doing some very interesting things in the back-end server area in
addition to their traditional desktop systems (if you don't like your G5 I
have a 450MhZ G4 here I'll be glad to trade :-).

I don't do any gaming, or much in the way of high-end graphics, but the
things I've seen in the very high-end graphics areas such as video
production has the G5 significantly outperforming any of the Intel based
machines.

....

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/

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

Bill Campbell wrote:
> SCO built their business by providing stable, if boring, platforms that
> were well suited for mission-critical accounting and business applications.
> IHMO their main strength beyond reliability was that they had a pretty good
> network of resellers, and applications developers who built the systems
> that Just Worked(tm) without a lot of flash or risk.

Thanks Bill, that's what I was trying to say previously.

Jeff
(The other other one.)

--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin
"A life lived in fear is a life half lived."
Tara Morice as Fran, from the movie "Strictly Ballroom"

In article <sKSOc.8551$GB1.790@twister.socal.rr.com>,
Jeffrey D Angus <jangus@socal.rr.com> wrote:
>
>
>FyRE wrote:
>> The only reason old SCO (not the current company) was successful, was
>> due to them being the ONLY viable *NIX option on cheap PC hardware as
>> Linux was being born. Unfortunately for them, they decided to sit back
>> on their laurels and let their ancient OS stagnate while the
>> competition grew in strength, arrogantly thinking nobody could
>> challenge them. Once it became obvious that Linux had passed them by
>> (some years back), they attempted to cobble its superior features into
>> the creaking old mess that's Openserver/Unixware. When they found that
>> nobody wanted their overpriced version of Linux, they took the good
>> old American approach to business "If you can't compete, litigate!".

>Well, you must have been asleep at the wheel then. Because there
>was Interactive Unix as well.

And Esix from the original company or it's new owner James River.

And you can't forget Dell's SysVR4 Unix either.

ISTR there were still one or two others about that time.

MicroPort had become a porting house for OEMs and from what I've
read SCO took their biggest customer, Lucent. And about 2 years
ago Microport ceased to exist.

If you count in all the variants there were 240 separate version
of Unix that graced this planet at one time or another.

And I have the manuals and distribution disks for IBM's AIX
on IBM's '386 platform. And I also have NeXTStep for Intel.

There were a lot of choices.

Most were specific to certain HW platforms, but even Intel was
shipping it's own version of Unix for awhile.

>The reason SCO "Stagnated" as yo put it, is that it was designed
>for business use. Think "reliable" not the "Let's see what new
>feature we can add and break something else this week" like Linux
>was in the early days. (And to some extent still is.)

I've noticed that at times.

.....

>Well, that's simple, most people running a bussiness application
>are too concerned about make "just because" hardware changes. What
>they ARE concerned about is that ANY changes to the system are NOT
>going to break it.

Actually a business should find the best piece of software for
their business model and they buy the OS and software that supports
that application.

Bill

--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com

In article <mailman.6.1091305840.14852.sco-misc@lists.celestial.com>,
Bill Campbell <bill@celestial.com> wrote:
>On Sat, Jul 31, 2004, FyRE wrote:
>>On 31 Jul 2004 10:52:47 -0700, "Tony Lawrence" <pcunix@gmail.com>
>>wrote:
>>
>>[...]
>>
>....
>>The reason I'm laughing, Tony, is because you seem to think SCO are a
>>competitor to MS. Never mind the evidence that MS brokered the funding
>>of SCO to keep them afloat, and are making gleeful use of idiot Darl's
>>ludicrous rants in their FUD campaigns. MS don't see SCO as a
>>competitor; they WANT them around, and if they manage to think up some
>>other way to channel funding to them without landing in court (again)
>>they'd be all over it.

>>The only reason old SCO (not the current company) was
>>successful, was due to them being the ONLY viable *NIX option on
>>cheap PC hardware...

>Actually the main reason that SCO was successful in the '80s,
>when there were several competing companies selling *nix for
>'x86, was that SCO built a stable, if boring, version of *ix that
>was well suited to stable commercial applications. BTW: Microsoft
>originally ported Unix to the Intel platform creating Xenix which
>also had many features of Berkeley Unix including the vi editor
>and csh.

>SCO had an agreement with Microsoft at the time to maintain
>Xenix for most vendors other than IBM with Microsoft maintaining
>and supporting it for IBM and a couple of other major hardware
>vendors. The original Tandy Xenix for their '68000 based machines
>were done by Microsoft, but SCO took up development and support
>of the Tandy versions shortly after that (Tandy also had some
>pretty competent Xenix developers in the early to mid '80s as
>well such as Frank Durda, and Tudor Apmadoc).

I thought that Durda had commented once that the orignal Xenix
work was done in house - the 1.x versions - and it was the 3.x
versions on the 68000 that were done by SCO. That was also when
SCO was selling Xenix for the Lisa - and the Lisa was also
a 68000 platform. [all sorts of interesting things including
what appears to be ALL the Lisa manual and docs, inluding
schematics - at www.applefritter.com/lisa/

....

>I think the beginning of the end for SCO was when they first
>went public, and the brokers and bean counters took over the top
>management of the company. That was probably the point when SCO
>shifted focus from the small-to-medium (SMB) business market,
>supported by their reseller network, to try to chase the high-end
>market dominated by Sun, NCR, and IBM.

My POV was that the new management didn't understand what they had.
This came shortly after the sexual harrasment charges were filed as
I recall.

....

>...

>>There's nothing that runs on the old SCO OS' that wouldn't run better
>>(after recompilation of course) on Linux. This is a fact.

>There are some applications that are in daily use on SCO
>platforms where the source code is no longer available, and are
>running 80286 code which isn't supported by iBCS/abi.

And I just went to a client site - moving from SCO this next month
- a performed a 'file' on one program.

Script started on Sat Jul 31 19:19:33 2004
353# file um
um: Microsoft a.out segmented word-swapped pre-SysV 286 executable
354# exit

script done on Sat Jul 31 19:19:38 2004

That is OLD code. I moved it from their old Xenix system in the
early 1990s and the date on the file was in the early 1980s.
Some code just never goes away. OS it's now on is OSR5.

> These still run on OpenServer, and are critical to the
>applications. The companies running them are often fairly small,
>and don't have the budget to rewrite the systems from scratch.
>These companies don't care about computer technology, they just
>want to have something that works reliably with a minimum of
>fuss and bother. I have one customer who's running OpenServer,
>and just wants things to keep running until he and his wife
>retire and close the business. Another is still running Caldera
>OpenLinux 1.3 dating back to 1998 or so, and probably won't
>update until his hardware falls dead on the floor.

The above company is changing as their main application depended u
upon one person who never seemed to have time to fix anything. And
they did not have the program that compiled the executeables.

They are moving into a custom open source package. Not cheap -
in the $70K+ range - but anyone who knows the languages will be
able to modify it for them as they will have the source.

They were bitten twice and vowed never to fall into that situation
again.

>>>There are also other contenders for whatever Unixish space Microsoft
>>>leaves us to swim in. Mac OS X is steadily gaining ground,

>>I use OSX at home, but it's not a competitor to MS or Linux for
>>business use. The G5 hardware is more expensive, and has not fared
>>well in benchmarks against x86 hardware (for gaming, graphic, audio or
>>business use).

>Apple is doing some very interesting things in the back-end
>server area in addition to their traditional desktop systems (if
>you don't like your G5 I have a 450MhZ G4 here I'll be glad to
>trade :-).

They also do some very strange things. A person with some Macs in
a colo rack has to manually restart the machines if it loses a
network connection as the NIC's get turned off. Another very
annoying thing this person found is that if the system reboots
with the NIC not-connected and all the web sites can't resolve,
the httpd-conf file is rewritten.

After the first time that happened he always backs up the files
to another area.

But those are operating in a server environment but way they
operate seems to think the designers were thinking only of desktop.
This is with the G4's or the xrack machines. They are getting
there but they don't seem to be rock-solid and able to restart
reconnect reliably after any unforseen incident.

Bill

--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com