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Red Hat Software Businesses

What if Red Hat bought SCO? 165

Posted by Hemos from the it'd-be-an-interesting-move dept.
Thexder wrote to us with a curious piece on what RH should do with all it's new found wealth: buy SCO. It's a crazy idea, and gives me a headache when I try to analyze it, but the author does have some interesting points.

disclaimer:Hemos owns shares in Red Hat
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What if Red Hat bought SCO? More

What if Red Hat bought SCO?

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  • A couple of points that have gotten overlooked that makes a RH acquisition of SCO attractive:

    1. An existing customer base. Seriously, most people who have fought^Wused SCO Unix have an existing investment in Intel-based hardware. Being able to tell them that for a minimal cost they have an upgrade path to a UNIX-like OS that is cleaner than SCO & with more of a future will not only keep these customers, but will immediately increase the Linux marketshare.

    BTW, I have used SCO Unix. It sucks. (You have to recompiled the kernel & reboot to change the IP address? Give me a break. Even NT has a better answer.)

    2. SCO owns the copyright on UNIX, last I heard. (They bought it from Novell who bought it from AT&T.) Need I say more?


    Geoff

  • Where should we go shopping?? (Score:4)

    by GFD ( 57203 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @07:12AM (#1723905)
    I think that this article raises some interesting ideas. I am not too sure if I agree with all them but I do have to say that I have been thinking quite a bit myself about where Red Had could use it's clout to aquire technology and re-release it under the gpl/lgpl, etc.

    I really do agree with Zedlewski's point that buying out another open source outfit would not accomplish anything worthwile.

    So the question becomes one of where does Linux and open source get the most bang for the buck? Does SCO own anything that is really worthwhile? Who does??

    One idea that tickles my fancy is buying out Imprise/Borland. They are one of the last great independent software tool vendors out there and having delphi under gpl would be just plain cool. They also have some interesting database technology.

    So what do people think? What other outfits should Red Hat look at??
  • SCO (SCOC) [nasdaq-amex.com] info can be found at nasdaq.com [nasdaq.com]. This pdf [nasdaq-amex.com] from nasdaq claims they have a market cap of only 279 million US dollars. Damn! That's not a lot for any big company to swallow. Why Sun doesn't buy them is beyond me, I just fix things there.
    Also, the owners who have more than 5% stake are:
    • MS 12.3%
    • Novell 13.8%
    • L Michaels 9.2%
    • D michaels 11.2%

    I don't have time to read their by-laws, but if someone tenures an offer and the majority of stockholders vote to accept, it usually doesn't matter what one investor thinks or wants.


    _damnit_
  • Screw that! That's like saying lets jump on the Misrocoft bandwagon just because they own 90% of the PC OS market. SCO has to hang in there and create new customers or die. They have to make it better or suffer what so many other OS's have suffered, the reality that something better is out there and taking over. SCO is too expensive and will lose, just like Misrocoft.
  • The existance of the proprietary OSS/Linux sound drivers has been inhibiting the development of proper, full-service, free software sound drivers for far too long. Red Hat should buy 4Front, release their drivers where possible as free software, and work on integrating them into standard Linux. 4Front's employees could continue to work semi-independantly fulfilling existing contracts and developing the NDA'd binary-only drivers. 4Front might actually go for this, since they seem to be in it for the money rather than intentionally crusading to keep Linux multimedia in the dark ages.

    Another useful technology Red Hat could set free would be the mtv MPEG player (www.mpegtv.com). I don't know if there are intellectual property issues that would prevent that being turned into free software, but it breaks my heart to see such a good bit of software trapped in shareware limbo.

  • The only problem with that is that (I think, I don't know) the Unix certification requires CDE and Motif (blame TOG).
  • Gee, my disto has libc5 in a place where it plays nice with libc6. And no I dont want to debate like an adult because I dont really care about your meaningless FUD.
  • Please do not spend 90 million dollars like
    all the other merger-crazied accounting
    dagger and cloaking hi-tech companies does.

    Indeed, many people have come to recognize
    the importance of bringing UNIX a friendly
    face--this was the overwelming theme that
    brings logic to the IPO of RedHat... whenever
    you create software you create value--especially
    OSS software. RedHat was definitely IPOed to
    answer to the need of customers, employees,
    and investors. However you prioritize it RedHat
    is not another proprietary software company
    with a closed source model. The RedHat brand
    is powerful and people will continue to true
    and purchase all sorts of services associated
    with RedHat innovated OSS software. We won't
    need to imitate proprietary companies hoarding
    and killing close-source software (Think SUN's Wabi and maybe StarOffice too if Sun keeps all the source to themselves)--even if
    they are a serious form of money-making method.

    I realize that a lot of linux users don't buy
    into the GNU and OSS philophy of software innovation. It's sorta like being an immigrant
    to America. You enjoy the green card. But that's
    it. But I invite you to do more than that.

  • What if pigs had wings? (Score:5)

    by BadlandZ ( 1725 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @07:17AM (#1723916) Journal
    What if Red Hat bought SCO? Who Cares. What if Pigs had Wings? Now there is something just as idiotic, but interesting too!

    Using thier money to "Aquire" more property is not the way of Red Hat. That is just plain stupid, and, only ONE of the suggestions in the article.

    I call you attention to item number 5, intitled "Tools." Ahhhh... People use applications, not OS's... Hmmm...

    Red Hat has money, now, if they want to keep the support of the Open Source Community they need to:

    • Dump resources into GCC, if GCC dies, Linux dies with it.
    • Dump resources into a GPL office suite, without KOffice or a Gnome Office, or some other open source office suite, in a few years everyone will just be downloading Red Hat for free, and buying a $400 copy of Microsoft Office for Linux every year.
    • Make what they have now work better. One of the most commonly used applications that ships with Red Hat is Netscape, you would think that Red Hat would have an intrest in getting all the plugins and bells and whistles working out of the box, so thier customers have something usefull after installation.
    • Subscription Plans Ditch the $60 box set whenever we feel like releasing something new, and be up front and honest. Sell a "Subscription to Red Hat Linux" for about $100 that includes 4 complete CD sets per year, that come out on a regular schedule, and are sure to have the most up to date software from the whole GPL community. People with a lot of bandwidth don't usually buy a boxed set anyway, so give the people without bandwidth the product they really want! (and if you offer to throw in a "emergency patchs" CD in once in a while for major security issues, the cost of an extra $5 CD per customer will probably be sure to get you thousands of people standing in line to pay $100 a year for a subscription that insures security).
    • Cygnus...not SCO If you insist on "buying someone out" at least buy some one with integrity...

  • Why? (Score:1)

    by mrsam ( 12205 )

    SCO are lusers. They were once the leading x86 *nix, and they squandered that lead. SCO's glory days are long over.

    The idea that RHAT should buy APLX makes a lot more sense. Does anyone know if the official RHAT distribution includes Applixware on the applications CD? And even if it does, bundling Applixware into the mainline distribution should generate some very interesting press.
    --

  • I'll agree that SCO classic is awful, but SCO ended up with UnixWare which was originally written by Bell Labs (I think) to be the reference implementation of SVR4 (which is basically what Solaris is). I used it back when Novell owned it and thought that it was a pretty good system. Reguardless of what your religous opinion is of SVR4, a lot of work went into it and it is True Unix. Now what RedHat would do with it I can't say, but have the feeling that it would hurt their focus as a Linux company.
  • Everything I've ever read from there has been very juvenille and poorly reasoned (whether I agreed with it or not).

    Slashdot, unfortunately isn't a whole lot better as far as submitted content goes.
  • Last I heard, Microsoft held approximately 14% of SCO, with Novell holding 10-11% and the younger and elder Michaels holding about 22% between them. If one of those didn't sell out, it would be difficult for Red Hat to buy more than 50% of SCO.

  • Colombia.

    Examine my email address to see why i make sure to point this out. :)
  • When I first began searching for a UNIX which
    would run on PCs back in the late 80s, I
    contacted SCO and asked them to send me some
    literature. About a month later, some stuff
    landed at my door step which had little to do
    with what I wanted to know. Accompanying the
    stuff was a SCO packing list which was printed
    on what looked like ditto master paper (for those
    of you too young to remember what ditto masters
    were, think bottom most copy of your Fed Ex
    label, the one where you have to press the pen
    down real hard to get anything to come out).

    The packing list output itself was of COBOL
    vintage.

    I'm a quick learner so have been ininterested
    in SCO since then.

    :-)
  • One can't read the article and be own the first post offcourse. It's a matter of priorities. I think our first-poster's priorities are very very clear :) Maybe the submit-page shold check the submitter's history to see if he/she has read the article and if he/she hasn't then just give the comment -1 points or something like that :)
  • Ehr had too much coffee? Broke up with your boyfriend? Anyhow...the link you mention doesn't show very much, but the system looks cool [viewtouch.com]. I the time it takes to port an application to another platform has more to do with the quality (platform-indepentency) of the code than the weirdness of the operating system.
  • I got into an argument with someone about this. But doesn't SCO have a majority holding of Open Group, the gang that owns the UNIX name?

    Yes, that will get attention. RHAT buys SCO, gets a hold of Open Group, qualifies Linux for all distros, and gets $$ off the other UNIX vendors.
  • From the article:
    Monterrey. The wildcard OS that might be a flop or might be the greatest Unix ever. In either case, you're covered. Unlike SCO by itself, which would die a flaming death on the failure of Monterrey, you always retain the option to cut your losses and bail (leaving IBM with another OS/2). But if it succeeds and doubts persist about Linux's scalability beyond 4-8 processor systems, you can position Monterrey as the high-end partner to Red Hat Linux.

    But if Red Hat did buy SCO and acquire Monterey, they couldn't make it free, because the copyright is shared with IBM. They'd have to persuade IBM to release it as free software, or else start selling non-free stuff, or else ditch Monterey altogether.

  • Pluses:
    1. The endless nagging about who ate whose breakfast will stop
    Minuses:
    1. A linux oriented company will inherit a descendant of the only Micorosft attempt to write Unix. See SCO docs for details.
    2. Unfortunately 1 is not funny. Anybody who have tried to port something to SCO (especially the older versions) will say so...
  • Will the Slashdot demigods start censoring comments that dare to criticize RedHat?

    Then again, this site has never been a source of unbiased information.

    No one forces you to read Slashdot. If you don't like their methods, leave. They are free to operate the site the way they want to. It's their site, not yours.

  • SCO is the Santa Cruz Operation, a commercial Unix vendor (who hasn't been doing real well lately).

  • I say no to the SGI idea.

    $950 for 5 Incident Support Package through Red Hat, $35,000 for thier Silver Support Package, not exactly the greatest bargins, Red Hat needs to come up with a stream line mass market support system.

    SGI is loosing ground, and support is one of thier lackings. SGI using Red Hat was thier solution, and it's not working as you can tell from the $16 to $11 drop. SGI's MIPS products are solid on the hardware side, but just troll the SGI newsgroups, and you will find users are very unhappy with IRIX. It's not that UNIX in general is giving them problems, but SGI's problems with IRIX, various bugs, chaos in patches and updates, nightmear upgrade stories, etc.

    Buying SGI would only give Red Hat another Support headache, just when they really need to get thier support more streamline, and focus it on a mass market. It would be a move in the wrong direction.

    Now, someone like Compaq or Dell on the other hand would be an excellent place to form a "partnership" on a long term scale. Red Hat needs to get in tight with one of the Intel based hardware vendors that can help them scale up to 2+ CPU servers with RAID on one hand, and looking down towards laptops and PDAs on the other hand. Those are some areas where the growth would be a little less painful. And a "partnership" rather than a "buyout" would allow them to gain some "help" and not "aquire the headache."

    If SGI is to get back on it's feet, it needs to do it on it's own. It's not thier hardware that is lacking, it's thier management. The few good techs never seen to see the light of day, or leave for other companies. The bad techs answer the phones and go to trade shows. Bad marketing, bad service, bad customer relations, and overpriced service/support contracts for a product that ends up a major headache for many consumers is going to keep driving them even lower than $11. Keep waiting for them to "bottom out" and get bought by someone like Compaq or Dell, who have proved they CAN handle the hardware buisness in todays market.

  • Red Hat partner with both Dell, Gateway, and Compaq, and get in there and really gain a market for thier OS.

    Then I'd like to see VA Research IPO, be a HUGE success, then buyout SGI and Caldera. Now, that would be a Linux market. VA could bolster Caldera enough to make it more head to head with Red Hat, and SGI would fit in thier product line pretty well, giving them MIPS to add to the Intel line.

    Then all the "extra" vendors out there could fill in the gaps with AMD systems. Like... Penguin Computing and Mandrake... Yea... Hey.. let's pair everyone up...

  • ie is a very real threat to the standards of the
    web/net and indirectly the desktop. for those
    who have not been following along, netscape
    proved that sight designers follow the market
    more than any standards and thus netscape became
    a more important standard than w3.org. it seems
    like ie is currently the most popular browser
    (i dont know if this is true but alot of people
    seem to believe its true) so content developers
    will go with that instead of standards, thus
    locking out others platforms. when they have
    the browser market, then they have the desktop and
    may be able to take the net itself. if i seem
    paranoid, im only rehashing what many of us already know. there has to be an open alternative
    to ie that people will actually want to use!
  • I wonder if there's a market for open business plan makers. (Electronic door to door market guru?). I wonder if he has a business plan for IBM, MS, Compaq and Sun handy too...
    In fact, I could use a business plan myself
    ---

  • Re:Questionable (Score:4)

    by mykey2k ( 42851 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @07:42AM (#1723942)
    Here's the actual numbers:

    Common stock owned:

    Novell, Inc. ......................................... 4,741,750 13.8%
    Corporate Headquarters
    122 East 1700 South
    Provo, Utah 84606
    Microsoft Corporation................................. 4,217,606 12.3%
    One Microsoft Way
    Redmond, Washington 98052-6399
    Douglas L. Michels(2)................................. 4,028,400 11.7%
    c/o The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
    400 Encinal Street Santa Cruz,
    California 95061-1900
    Lawrence Michels(3)................................... 3,149,992 9.2%
    30376 Snowbird Lane
    Evergreen, Colorado 80439


    From www.edgar-online.com, proxy statement for SCOC, Jan 21 1999.
  • In theory it sounds like it can be a good idea, but what many people forget about is the culture clash that must be worked out with companies that are bought out/merged/divested/"whatevered."

    It would end up being a management and communication nightmare. You can read this for more information about this problem:
    http://www.hewitt.com/news/pressrel/1998/08-03-9 8.htm
  • I agree totally with the idea that Qt should be under gpl. It is just getting too strategic for Linux (like it or not). I wonder though about the chemistry, given some of the history between KDE and Gnome.

    Maybe it would be better if Mandrake bought them out. They now have money and will go public "as soon as possible". This might also set the stage for more support to help KDE and Gnome interoperate better.

  • Better they buy Mandrake (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mandrake has been building a business on Red Hat and not doing too shabby a job of it either. Mandrake needs Red Hat at least for the moment and Red Hat would benefit from what Mandrake has done with their product/distro. Owners of both companies would prosper and we'd get a better product.
  • Oi! You're that bloke who sold me Luxembourg the other day! I'll get you for that
    ---

  • In today's free market, a corporation needs synergy. Red Hat needs a way to vertically integrate with retail outlets, benchmarking companies, fast food chains, movie theaters, theme parks, pharmecuticals, TV broadcast companies, chemical weapons manufacturers. That is the only way a company can give its customers true choice.

    This way, RH LINUX can be inserted into a vertical market and come out as practically any sort of product! We can have "Heroes of Open Source" action figures, a hit thriller movie, happy meals, anything you can think of!!!! Plus, if you've secured heavy investments in media content companies, you'll always have rave reviews of your various products but a phone call away!

  • Disclaimer - after a looonnnnggg time, this poster owns shares in Red Hat. Woo Hoo!

    Actually, I think you've got some good points there. I don't know about buying SCO (depends on the price), but grabbing a significant stake might be a good idea. And I love the part about helping out Borland and other tool providers.

    However, my personal interest is that Red Hat stock prices drop. So I can buy some more. Stop going up! Please ...

  • RedHat is a business. Their model is like few others, and they do a lot of good things(TM) for the open source community and for Linux, but they are still a business.

    You pose the question "where does Linux and open source get the most bang for the buck?"

    This is the wrong question. It should read: "Where does RedHat get the most bang for the buck?"

    Let's face it, the value of the free publicity RedHat receives is greater than their $10M in gross sales. The last thing they need to do is buy software companies or vendors and *give* their goods away. They need a solid foothold in something more than an emerging market. What is best for linux, and best for open source, is not always what is best for RedHat.

    Purchasing SCO seems like a sound business decision... and very cool. It would benifit Linux, RedHat, and Un*x administrators and developers as a whole. Exciting!
  • Regarding getting paid less as a programmer...

    When CAD came along, did the architects get paid less? Nope. They just do more with better technology...

    The point isn't at all to get paid less. It's to get paid roughly the same rate and be more productive. There is plenty of work to be done programming computers, and I'd like to get to some of it instead of wasting my time with licensing issues and who owns what.



    Doing an Office2000 install... MS now uses a 25 character license key. Good god folks, what next, 50 chars? 100? Will we soon hafta punch our entire genetic code into the damn license key box?? If only outfits like MS would spend a little more time working on their OS'es and apps, maybe they wouldn't hafta worry so much about protecting their revenues. (grumble grumble...)


  • Well, you should try to do some development on SCO. No one support sthem. There are NO memory leak detectors on the market for SCO anymore. Everyone's dropping support. Their tech support is abysmal. I may be wrong, but the OS (OpenServer 5.0.5) didn't even seem to support threads! Instead, the "task library" (based on papers by Bjarne back in 1987) is included to provide thread emulation.

    Thanks, but I'll stick with Linux.

    Tom
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Tom McKearney
  • Hmm...
    Does we really want Open Source happy meal?
    Some thing's might be better left alone...
  • Nope, there is a competing GPL'd sound system ALSA at http://www.alsa-project.org [alsa-project.org]. Why split efforts?
  • That assumption has been made by a lot of companies recently if you look at the recent state of some mergers (see WebMD-Healtheon).
  • Why split efforts?

    Face it, efforts are already split. There's OSS/Linux, 4Front's proprietary product, OSS/Free, the out-dated and crippled version 4Front puts out every so often which is just "good enough" to stop significant development effort going into an alternative, there's the sound code in the Linux kernel tree which is derived from OSS/Free but has been modularised and improved by kernel hackers, and then there's ALSA, which can never get enough developers because they're all too busy working around the lossage created by 4Front.

    If Red Hat bought 4Front, then instead of 4 sound systems on Linux we could have 2 and a bit. There might even be a chance for an eventual merge of the two free systems. That's an improvement by my reckoning.

  • Sorry, I really should have read that article. I won't do it again.
  • Whoops, sorry, didn't mean to shout. But, after reading all the BS above and then coming across a gem like this I just had to.
  • Ok, so I examined your email and I noticed that it is a .edu. I therefore assume that you're educated in both spelling and geography. Congrats. If you could examine my breath right now, you'd observe that I stayed up all last night drinking vodka and salad dressing. I think I can be excused for not being able to spell or punctuate correctly. If not, I'll just pass out now. Thanks,
    --Shoeboy
  • At least he told you he was biased.

    So, let's moderate your post down, ok?

    ;-)

    Disclaimer: I wish I owned more shares of Red Hat, so sell yours after the 30 day mark so I can buy it cheap.

  • No, the Open Group is a Consortium. No one owns it or a part of it. There are many companies that are members of the Open Group -- SCO happens to be one of them, but SCO doesn't have any special powers in the Open Group.
  • One of the old jokes about SCO's habit of making everything a separate product: "Well of course it comes with ls. -l, however, costs extra."

  • Funny story about BillG and SCO (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26, 1999 @08:28AM (#1723969)
    Just to clear up some issues about the relationship between SCO and Microsoft: (i.e., not everyone associated w/MS is evil)

    A long time ago, Microsoft decided to try to make an x86 UNIX. They called it Xenix, and lo, it sucked.

    A couple of enterprising characters from Santa Cruz approached Bill and offered to buy an exclusive license for the code, plus rights to port MS applications to the new OS. Bill thought, "Hell, who wants a x86 UNIX anyway? It's a piece of junk- SURE!"

    These Santa Cruz characters turned Xenix around in unbelievable time. Soon, it rocked. It was fast and stable. Moreover, it had one of the first and best POSIX and C2 implementations on commodity hardware. (something MS still can't manage over a decade later) Thus SCO totally conquered the BIG $$ government market that MS had been aiming at. This made Bill extremely mad.

    One day, the licensing checks from SCO to MS were a day late. Bill grabbed his lawyer, hopped a plane from Redmond to Santa Cruz. Bill and showed up at the door of a little yellow house in Santa Cruz that was SCO. Bill banged on the door and threw a HUGE tantrum, screaming "I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE!!" and claming he was there to reposess the Xenix source code. Meanwhile, somebody slipped out the back door to the bank and got Bill his check. SCO was saved, but bill was still mad.

    Next time the contract to port MS apps to UNIX/Xenix came up, Bill had a demand. "Write us a POSIX layer for our new OS!" SCO: "Screw you!" Bill: "Fine, no apps for you!"

    They're still feuding. Of course, Bill has gone on to fame and fortune on the back of applications like Word and Excel as much as Windows, but he still hates SCO. They will always be a thorn in his side until, with his billions of dollars and hundreds of programmers he can finally produce a POSIX and networked C2 certifiable system like those few hackers did in a couple of months. He'd love to get his greedy paws into the gov't market, still SCO's bread&butter.

    If anything, Red Hat buying SCO would be a great way to inject Open Source code into the US Gov't, and we all know this would be a great thing.

  • Um....no. First of all, because it's stupid/cenorship, and quite frankly, no comments here are going to make any difference to the stock.

    Also, the SEC would put anyone who did that in jail/big fines.
  • And this post isn't.

    A juvenille post about juvenille postings.

    Noone's forcing you to read anything.

    Crawl back into your hole.

  • SGI!! (Score:1)

    by ibis ( 16191 )
    Then at least they'd get a decent UN*X!!

    Seriously, SGI stock is really a bargain now, as investors stupidly took the Linux announcement and the Belluzo announcement as BAD news, the fools.

    It dropped from $16 to $11, and should have gone the other way. Doesn't that mean it will eventually climb to $21 or more?!

    If RHAT doesn't buy SGI, then at least those who flipped their RHAT should...
  • Uh...actually you can. What you're forgetting is that you can use stock to buy companies. It's done all the time, usually under the moniker of "stock-for-stock" transactions. As long as the acquisitions are additive, investors will not punish the company for minor dilution. So, in a sense, RHAT does have a very real currency.

  • GPL would not be good for Qt. It would put it at a disadvantage compared to GTK+ where propietary software is concerned. Placing Qt under the LGPL would completely, once and for all, level the playing field between Gnome and KDE.

    With all of that said I think that if Red Hat bought Troll Tech Qt would automatically and irrevocably be placed under a BSD/MIT style OSS license. Someone else may be able to verify this. The Trolls have made their company rather unatractive to purchasers by making their main asset unsaleable.

  • I don't think this is a good idea. The Qt developers are very good at what they are doing. Being burned by GPL advovates in the great KDE/Qt flamewar I think they would quit. This would cause Qt to lose momentum. Better if SUSE bought Troll Tech at poured resources into KDE.

    RedHat should stick with GNOME and of course ensure compability with KDE. I think that is a recipe to beat Microsoft on the desktop.

    Otherwise, buying Cygnus would be a great idea since Cygnus is much more important for Linux than RedHat is.

  • Re:Microsoft owns part of SCO (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, you're only partially right. Microsoft developed one of the first versions of Unix for the x86 market, called Xenix. (I used to have an Altos 586 machine with Microsoft Xenix. It was an 8086-based machine with 512K of RAM, and it allowed five concurrent users to log in on dumb terminals. Not great, but definitely not a disaster.)

    Microsoft had to pay a fairly stiff royalty to AT&T on each copy of Xenix they sold. Microsoft doesn't like this sort of arrangment, and decided to divest their "Santa Cruiz Operation." And so SCO was formed as a free-standing entity.

    As a condition of the divestment of Xenix, Microsoft agreed to never enter the Unix market with a competeing product. Therefore they are barred from producing their own Unix (Microsoft Linux is a legal impossiblity because of this.)
  • I'd be less surprised if Windows imploded first. Why not sharpen your Qt skills writing proprietary software on Windows; then if and when Windows implodes all your code can be ported to Linux, *BSD, you name it (-:
  • Drinking salad dressing? I know you're a weird one, Shoeboy, but I didn't know you were that weird.

    But I have a real question. In your letter, you mention in passing that Linux is destined to lower software sales revenue, and I guess you're commenting that someday programmers will get paid less. Do you see that as a Bad Thing, and if so, how can you come to terms with being such a greedy bastard, and if not, how are you going to buy vodka and salad dressing when the revolution comes?
  • This is horribly off topic, but shouldn't that be {g,k}panel? KDE and Gnome are just collections of apps that are intended to look similar and play well together.

  • That's NOT a Media Subscription.. (Score:3)

    by BadlandZ ( 1725 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @09:22AM (#1723993) Journal
    I think you read their subscription information wrong, that's a subscription to a support contract, not for media alone.

    A huge number of peopl would not want their "Silver Support" subscription with a $35,000 price tag!!

    I am talking about CDROM.COM style subscriptions, to the MEDIA, not the support. Red Hat could easily use it's financial resources to put out a quarterly distribution that included all the latest and greatest applications and information on a CD for under $100 a year (which would still be outrageously high priced for a total of maybe 8 CD's a year, which would probably cost them $1-2 per CD to produce).

    They should be maintaining a solid base of applications anyhow for thier product, and batch runs on a CD burner that would crank out some disks to drop in the mail with a little "product brocher" or something would make good marketing sense for them (because it would provide them with the information they need to know about who might be willing to pay for at least the media, Plus, give them a direct way to let thier users know what new products and services like support contracts were avaliable).

    If AOL and Microsoft can send out Free CD's to people a few times a year without cost to get people to just consider using thier browser or internet service, I would sure think Red Hat could use a mechinism like this to keep in contact with thier "bulk" customers, and provide a valuable service at a reasonable price.

  • Just Some Thoughts (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SCO has come a long way since then, folks. OpenServer and UnixWare both have fully embedded and fully functional TCP/IP stacks. UnixWare 7 has the best C/C++ development system I've ever seen. Their system administration tools are without rival. Tarantella is a revolutionary idea and a good step in the direction towards server-centric computing with thin clients. And SCO is vigilant to make sure most of the Open Source applications are available for their OSes in pre-ported binaries (skunkware, freely available from sco.com). SCO also contributes to the Open Source community itself (lxrun is the first of several open source initiatives by SCO). What SCO does a terrible job of doing is marketing and PR. Every post in this forum about SCO reflects a reputation that is based on people's experiences with SCO *years* ago. Nonetheless, despite these experiences (and despite some very real challenges today), SCO continues to be successful. Their stock (SCOC) is now trading in the 8's, up from the 2's not too long ago. SCO owns the Unix technology as oringally developed by Unix System Labs and AT&T, and has continued to advance this technology. Yet, when SCO is mentioned, people conjure up images of a SCO long past. This is bad PR on SCO's part. Plain and simple. The SCO that sells UnixWare 7 and Tarantella is becoming a completely different outfit than the SCO that sold Open Desktop and Xenix. On top of this, SCO is still making a killing from OpenServer sales, a good five years after that product's initial release. In short, I don't know if buying SCO would be good for either Red Hat, SCO, or the industry. However, I think Red Hat would get a great deal.

  • Explain. I thought it was interesting read at the very least and most of it sound marketing strategy. Should redhat follow these instructions I see it's profits increasing at the cost of potentially alienating free software developers not paid by redhat.

  • You're right! The declaration that something is wrong and therefore he would never do it should *never* be enough! I demand Hemos be executed *immediately* for crimes he never committed!
  • Visbroker the crown jewel of Borland, Not to mention JBuilder. Best of the breed and if open sourced would accelerate the adoption of GPL ed tools at a rapid rate. Both GNOME and K Inc. need not fight over Orbit/MICO. They now would have an industry standard Broker architecture in hand.

  • It appears SCO no longer has XENIX License (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Here is a disclosure regarding the XENIX license from SCO's 10-K of 12/97

    SCO has several license agreements with Microsoft pursuant to which Microsoft has provided software technology to SCO, including XENIX. Microsoft has rights to terminate its licenses with SCO in the event of the acquisition of SCO by a competitor of Microsoft, which may affect any such acquisition. SCO believes that, if such an acquisition occurred and Microsoft canceled these licenses, SCO could obtain alternative technology from other sources and could incorporate such technology into SCO's products, or alternatively, SCO could continue operations without such technology with no material impact to its business. However, the loss of any significant third-party license, or the inability to license additional technology as required, could have a materially adverse effect on the Company's results of operations until such time as the Company could replace such technology.

    This text (and all other references to XENIX being a current product of SCO) has been removed from the 12/98 10-K.

  • Now that RHAT has to be RHAT, the name of the game is keeping and increasing that shareholder happiness.

    1.) Buying SCO, if the analysts like it, may give an uptick.

    2.) The enevitable layoffs that would hit accounting/administration/marketing provide an uptick (From the "Stock in the dulldrums? Announce a layoff!" school of increasing stock price)

    3.) Maybe the chance to be profitable without increasing the price of the distribution another $30 provides another uptick.

    4.) A west coast presence (SCO has a pretty nice campus).
  • WOW! I done all forgot about VISIBROKER... Yes, a gpl/lgpl'd VISIBROKER would be a Good Thing (tm)! Not to mention their good compilers, etc.
  • Wow, a thoughtful question! What are you doing on /. ;-) No, I don't think that programmers will starve, and I don't think that cheap software is bad. I buy commercial software from time to time, but nothing I write is ever distributed outside my company, so cheap software benefits me and doesn't cut into my cash flow. I figure that most coders are developing internal apps and are thus in the same boat as me. Cheap software just means that software companies won't turn their employees into overnight millionaires. That's fine with me, I can't imagine sympathizing with someone pulling down 70K/yr just because his stock options won't let him retire at 30.
    --Shoeboy
  • Yeah. Suse should do it.
    However, no matter how good Troll developers are ( and they are really good !) Qt is not a recipe to beat MS on the dekstop. Qt can be only as fast as underlying graphics architecture allows it to be and right now XFree still can't come even close to performance offered by profesionally written graphic card drivers on Win platform.

  • Wrong! (Score:3)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @11:12AM (#1724008) Homepage Journal
    Linux, like HP-UX, SCO Unixware, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other operating systems, is an operating system designed to meet the POSIX and Unix standards. The history of the code is irrelevant--what it does is what matters. If you don't believe me, ask the company that holds the Unix trademark.

    To receive the legal right to call Linux "Unix," all that would need to be done is pay some company to certify that it meets the latest Unix standard as published by The Open Group. This simply requires money to pay for the proceedure, and developers to fix any problems encountered in the certification process. (Unfortunately, the Unix branding would probably only apply to a particular release of a particular distribution.)

    I haven't looked at the standard myself, but I doubt there's much there that Linux doesn't have. Oh, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the commercial Unixes haven't bothered with actual Unix branding. Perhaps we should check to see if Solaris and HP-UX are really "Unix-like operating systems."

  • SGI (Score:1)

    by engel ( 80827 )
    OK, it may be I am impressed with SGI, but I think if red hat is going to chunker out a bunch of cash, they should buy SGI.

    And they can do it:

    SGI

    Red Hat [thestreet.com]

    SCO [thestreet.com]

    Red hat is values at some 5 billion (most likely a large chunk of which is 'liquid') while SGI is around 2 billion. Imagine if all of SGIs technologies and manufacturing and research and ... and.... and .... etc were all at red hat's disposal.

    Screw SCO (although for the price it may not be a bad idea), but SGI would rock. Oh yeah, and I do agree that QT, APLIX and otehrs would be a good buy, too. Maybe better than SGI considering what is really wrong with linux is not the OS (it is great) but the fact that there isn't a "Killer App" for people to choose OVER microsoft. Until Linux gets an app that MS can't do, no one "will be fired for buying MS."
  • Shoot: the preview didn't work right. The SGI thestreet.com page is at:
    http://quote.thestreet.com/cgi-bin/texis/StockQu otes?tkr=SGI

    or:

    SGI [thestreet.com]
  • First of all, who is going to believe a word you say when you can't even express your opinion intelligently. I say "Hell No" to your not so well informed comments. You say things like you actually know what you are talking about and then maybe I'll care about what you have to say.
  • Unless they open up the copyrights owned
    by SCO ofcourse :) And publish their source.

  • A lot of good ideas (Score:3)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @06:10AM (#1724013) Homepage
    There are a lot of good ideas in that piece beyond just the purchase of SCO. (And if folks would read the article instead of trying to grab 'first post' they'd know what SCO was.) Whether Red Hat acts on any of them (and who knows, RHAT may have already been thinking about some of them) remains to be seen.

    One thing, I believe Microsoft still owns about a 10% position in SCO (as do a couple of other companies - AT&T?). Wonder if they'd be willing to sell it, and with what attached strings?

  • What good would it do? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Given that *TODAY* the Linux users can't agree on what version of linux is worth porting to, and which one is not, why would buying SCO help anyone? SCO's assets are protected IP, and a de-valuating IP, IMNSHO.

    (VARBusiness did a poll back 5 years ago about SCO. 80% of the people who answered said they would not get 'in bed' with SCO again, if they had to do it all over again.)

    And really, the vendors doing the ports of code to 'linux' are not the ones to blame for the 'we only support redhat linux' problem. It is **YOU** the consumer of shrink-wrapped binaries. Are **YOU*** asking for binaries that will run on *ANY* Linux-compatible system, be it redhat, suse, debian, SCO, Solaris, BSD etc or are you just saying 'port to linux', and then throw in that you are running redhat? (Hint: today you do have a LSB - its called the compatibility modes of SCO/Solaris/BSD. If it runs there, it will run anywhere.)

    If **YOU** the consumer of shrink-wrapped linux binaries don't get your act together...then the 'linux' who has the most ports done to it will be the official 'linux', in the eyes of the economic world.

  • disclaimer:Hemos owns shares in Red Hat (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This looks like another major conflict of interest to me. Will the Slashdot demigods start censoring comments that dare to criticize RedHat?

    Then again, this site has never been a source of unbiased information.

  • My open letter to red hat (Score:5)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @06:28AM (#1724021) Homepage
    Dear Mr. Young and the Red Hat, Inc. Board of Directors,

    Your recent, wildly successful, IPO has shown, to the joy of Linux fans everywhere, that Wall Street investors are smoking crack. Linux is destined to lower profit margins on software sales for everyone, but investors still see you as a potential gold mine. Now is the time to leverage your core buisness asset of crack smoking investors. As crack and glass pipe supplies have been drastically lowered during your IPO you need to invest in entities that will ensure an adequate supply of crack cocaine for future stock growth. Allow me to suggest the nation of Columbia.

    Acquisitions: There are occasional rumors that Red Hat would consider buying a small european nation such as Luxembourg with its newfound wealth. Bad idea. Who owns Luxembourg? Who do you write the check to.
    Instead, and this is key: buy Columbia from the Medelin cartel. This will provide a sufficient amount of coca plants to fuel irrational investor exuberance into the next millenium. What does this bring you?

    Equatorial climates and loads of coke. What better way to enjoy your wealth?

    Columbia will also give you easy access to Peru's shining path guerillas. These rebels are brutal fanatics, just like linux users. Imagine unleashing a horde trained jungle warriors in the midst of Redmond. Instant coup de etat and you're the CEO of Microsoft! Then you can let your investors snort cocaine off the top of Steve Ballmers glistening scalp. What a way to build market enthusiasm.

    Revenue. IPO money is great, but the real money is in narcotics smuggling. You currently only have 10 million in revenue. That's paltry compared to the amount you could make by cornering the market on coke.

    CIA contacts. That's right, once you're a major player in the drug arena, the government will bend over backwards for you. They need the drugs for controling inner city unrest and will gladly charge mandrake and debian with antitrust suits just to keep the supply going.

    Human capital. Linux programmers are cool to have around, but what company can afford to be without mules? You can use the cartel's drug runners to swallow encryption algorithms and smuggle them out of the country. This will allow you to be the only US software company with real encryption.

    Buy Columbia from the drug lords, it just makes sense.
    --Shoeboy
  • Pretty funny, even though I'm colombian I take no offense :)

    Colombia is the country's name... Columbia is a city in SC :)

  • This is a solid idea. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    *THINK* about it before you open your mouth. SCO is going to die soon, but there are diamonds in the rough of their OS. Proprietary diamonds that PHBs like. Diamonds that can be bought and GPL'ed and improved upon. The guys at RH are still smart enough to throw the crap away and keep the good stuff. With ownership of SCO IP it would be trivial to insure complete binary cross-compatibility, and move a whole bunch of Sad, SAD SCO boxen over to Linux. :) The Linux SOTA would be knocked up a serious notch in a few months. The employee base is also very attractive. "Total Solutions" is serious business. The linux community is like a family. Families are reactionary units, that are strongly resistant to change. If Dad tries to go on a diet, Mom, Jr. and Sis will most likely do whatever they can to make the man eat and stay fat. This is just human nature. They don't know if a skinny dad will be different, maybe less fun, maybe he'll run off with a new, skinny mom... We need to resist these knee-jerk reactions "SCO is Bad." "RedHat can't do that." Blah Blah Blah. It's an adult world out there. And Linux has grown up. Now it's our turn. Anonymous 'cause I don't like people. Some guy named Joe.
  • I'm not sure why but I've always had a bad taste for them, you can't crush them if you buy them.
  • assuming that their employees could be trained to the OSS vision.
    Why does this sound frightenly like a Soviet-style "Reducation Camp?"

    Well, except that they both involve "education," I have no idea.

    Nobody forces you to work for any particular company. If you don't like the company's basic goals and philosophy, find another job. Or convince the company that you're right and they're wrong.


    --

  • Actually, Linux is not POSIX certified. There's some minor details I don't fully understand that make it not be POSIX compliant.
  • Why wouldn't RHAT buy Corel?
  • Actually, I was going to write something about this in the original article. I love Qt and would really like, at the very least, for them to release a low-cost/free version for commercial development on Unix/Linux, but keep charging for the cross-platform version (of course, LGPL all around would be even better for the consumers, but they're still a business).
    It seemed, however, that one of the other Linux distributors would probably be better suited to make this move. It would be pretty awkward for RedHat to abruptly drop GNOME/GTK right now, but if they didn't move to Qt as their primary platform, it wouldn't be a very good investment.
    Still, something has to give with the current Qt licensing system. It's ridiculous to charge $1500 per developer for a widget set, even if it is fantastic. How much is MS Visual Studio Pro now? $750? And companies with an absolute focus on cross platform capability can always settle for Java for free, despite its faults. There you get a large, skilled developer base and your choice of many IDEs. If Troll-Tech (or their future owner) doesn't wise up in the next year, they'll rapidly be made irrelevant in the commercial markets when Swing and fast JVM's really become common.
    --JRZ
  • > ..with the exception that you don't need to go through a ton of menu options to compile the kernel (which compiles a damn sight faster than the Linux kernel).

    What you are doing on SCO is re-linking the kernel, NOT recompiling it - the drivers and the kernel core are shipped as binary modules. I am not completely familiar with what all happens when you relink on SCO, but I believe there are some modules that are re-compiled. All these hold are the configuration information you can edit - basically a bunch of constants and data areas, no code to speak of. Its considerably less work than compiling the source for the entire kernel and all the drivers.

    I think it might be handy to have a similar mechanism for tweaking settings on an already compiled set of Linux kernel object modules, but it would involve a considerable reorganization of the code and kernel build process, for a limited benefit.

    Cheers
    Eric
  • If Red Hat wants to be "the" one you are right, they will need to add to their lineup. The true bells and whistles they will need are the RAD tools. This scenario is already playing itself out in the public markets( see Motorola paying up for Metrowerks to get their CodeWarrior tool). Logic would dicate then that Red Hat would want to buy the companies with the best tools. Having just returned from the recent expo I saw a handful of RAD tool companies, but the one that stood head and shoulders above the rest in my opinion (as well as others as is evidenced by their winning the "Best Tool Company" award )was Omnis Technology. Omnis "Web Client" enables you to build a web-enabled solution rapidly without writing code in Java. In a demonstration at the show, they demonstrated an application and web-enabled it within five minutes without writing a line of code in Java or HTML. It is to my knowledge the only environment which one can write and deploy in any platform without any tweaking of code at all. Further it can access all databases. I would think Red Hat would be interested in a company like this, with a non-existent market cap, to get their RAD tools.
  • You mean like when Compaq bought out Digital?
  • There is one more point to it:

    Microsoft owns 30%+ of SCO. It is questionable whether RH wants to buy something in which M$ has some level of control.

    And if the buy is done by stock swap M$ will hold a sizeable chunk of RH. Now this might make the job of the Justice department much easier, but is not something Bob Young would enjoy.

    mfg lutz
  • I would like to know what lead you to say that SCO hasn't been doing well lately? I have seen no indication. The stock has hit a 52 week high recently and they had a good last quarter.
  • Once upon a time, USL owned the Unix trademark and System V source code. They were bought by Novell in its expansion period, who subsequently sold its unix assets to SCO during its contraction period.

    So SCO owns the Unix trademark and System V source code (or have they done something with it since then?).

    Buy SCO, release System V under GPL, and brand Linux the only official Unix!
  • Incorrect. Microsoft doesn't anything near 30%+ of SCO. The last time SCO dealt with Microsoft was in the late 80's with MS XENIX. Over the past couple of years SCO has done whatever possible to distance themselves from Microsoft. One major accomplishment was to remove all XENIX legacy compatibility from SCO products, so that paying licensing fees to MS could be terminated. Microsoft does still hold stock in SCO, but nowhere near the level you mentioned. Microsoft has no say in the things that SCO does. End of story.
  • >I am pretty sure SCO has bought all of itself
    >out couple of years ago.

    This is not correct. SCO is still publicly traded
    (SCOC on the NASDAQ) and as recently as March
    Novell was still selling the chunks of SCOC
    they'd picked up in exchange for something they'd
    sold SCO. Besides, even if M$FT owns 10%, if RHAT
    owns a controlling share in the company (hell, if
    they offered me $10/share I'd sell my trivial
    stake) there wouldn't be squat that the Evil
    Empire could say.
  • SCO is the Santa Cruz Operation. If you had read the entire article in question, you would have picked up that SCO is one of the foremost Unix makers in the world. Their address (SCO.COM [sco.com]) might have helped a little, but most of us who have been around for some time have come to know SCO on some level. Their Unixware 7.0 and OpenServer are some of the highest (if not THE highest) selling Unix variants on the market. They also have a lot of clout with the OpenGroup (see X.ORG [x.org]).

    Hope this satisfies your "first post" question.
  • More replies like this please! These are the gems that keep me from ignoring comments all together.
  • Sorry, my mistake, you are right the kernel is just re-linked, not fully compiled as I suggested. And the idea that Linux does a similar thing is a good one, but as you say this would require a lot of work. It would be nice though.

    Tom.
  • The point is finding out who has code that will most benefit Linux that Redhat can buy.
  • You would be surprised how many old SCO (3.2v4.2) installations are out there, in small business enviroments. Small doctor's offices, small retail stores for POS systems, etc. Many of these systems are not getting upgraded for Y2K, even though they should. Many of the small businesses that I see are just ignorant of the issues, or are hoping they won't get hit too badly. (Keep in mind when I say "small business", I mean a operation with less than 10 or 15 people). I see a market in sites that could be upgraded from SCO to Linux. In most cases, the upgrade is pretty painless because of iBCS, and Linux is priced right compared to UnixWare, especially for the small outfits. I am working with one larger site now (125+ employees) that went to Linux mostly because SCO wanted over $10,000 to upgrade them to UnixWare 7 for the number of user licenses. It would be really neat if Red Hat bought SCO -- what a perfect market to exploit, and a quick way to advance towards World Domination. SCO does have some good technologies that businesses want that Linux needs now, like fault tolerant clustering, and support for ridiculous amounts of RAM on Intel machines. They have a fully NT compatible PDC implimention for SCO, which I'm sure the Samba guys could use (if only for hints on some of the hidden details yet to be reversed engineered out of NT). But I would be shocked if it actually happened....

  • SCO? what about Qt/Troll Tech? (Score:3)

    by bored ( 40072 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @06:56AM (#1724063)
    If they are to buy anything, the first thing they should buy is Troll Tech! Then they can release Qt under the GPL which would solve a lot of issues with the commercial use of KDE.


  • SCO does not own Unix (Score:3)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @07:01AM (#1724065) Homepage Journal
    While I think you are correct that SCO owns some of the Unix source code, the trademark is held by The Open Group. TOG has been licensing Unix branding for several years.

    Disclaimer: I am a former employee of The Open Group, back when it actually did things more interesting than branding and standards.

  • Three words. (Score:3)

    by Greg@RageNet ( 39860 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @07:06AM (#1724067) Homepage
    Supporting Legacy Systems

    Buying SCO you'd have to deal with all the bagage of supporting UNIXWARE and their existing customers. One of the great things about RedHat right now is that it doesn't have this huge load of bagage it has to deal with. They can stay focused on Linux.

    Besides, who'd wanna buy a UNIX that sells the TCP/IP stack as a seperate product?? blah.

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