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Caldera Operating Systems Software Unix Linux

Notes From The SCO Roadshow's First Stop 382

Posted by timothy from the whistlestop dept.
compactable writes "Just got back from the first half of the SCO roadshow's first stop in Toronto. No unfurling of IP, no NDA, however an interesting view of what's running this litigious blip of a corporation. Full details at my weenie write-up (feel free to mirror the contents so that my ISP doesn't kill me)."
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Notes From The SCO Roadshow's First Stop More

Notes From The SCO Roadshow's First Stop

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  • MIRROR (Score:5, Informative)

    by xris ( 11996 ) * on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:22PM (#7158577)
    FM: First Mirror :-)

    http://farcaster.net/sco.html [farcaster.net]

  • I *love* the SCO Roadshow on PBS (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:22PM (#7158579)
    It's great when they look at people's old operating systems and tell them how much they owe SCO.

    "Well, this is running Linux kernel v2.0.3. You owe SCO $327. Please pay on your way out."

    "This is nice, Linux 2.6 exerimental. You owe SCO a full $699, plux a future tax of 10%. Please pay on your way out."

  • The real question is (Score:5, Funny)

    by coolmacdude ( 640605 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:23PM (#7158591) Homepage Journal
    what is the draw for the average consumer?

    I mean at least have a decent sideshow or something.
    Like, Hilary Rosen juggling piggy banks of 12 year olds.
    then again...
    • Funny. ;)

      The real benefit of the roadshow wasn't what happened at the roadshow, but announcing that you are having a roadshow. ;)
    • Well it is somewhat of an attempt, I'll give them that. The presentation is supposed to show us all that they are not quite as obsolete as we think. An online update site is quite the step up for SCO. In addition to other duties, I admin a doctor's office that consists of a SCO server, and 10 old-school Wyse terminals. Back in 99 I would have loved to be able to DL the Y2K patch and easily install everything. Patching that box takes up more of my time than I'd like to spend on a SCO OS, anything that makes

  • The best part... (Score:4, Funny)

    by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75@yaho ... minus herbivore> on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:25PM (#7158602)
    The best part of this whole thing is watching this poor guy's site counter shoot up. Was at 131 when I got there - now at 584 two minutes later. I'm watching the Slashdot effect in action in front of my own eyes!

  • Suspicious... (Score:5, Funny)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:27PM (#7158612)
    Their mention of McBride making some soon-to-be-published "top 5 influential executives list" ...And recently Linus Torvalds made #5 on the list of most influential people. Perhaps they are saying that because he became influencial by virtue of "Their Work", that they, by proxy, have the world's most influential executive?

    Ryan Fenton
    • maybe they just smoke crack
      and that explains every other thing they do.

    • Hitler and Stalin named two of the top 5 influential political leaders of the 20th Century.
      • I think Hitler and stalin were highly influential on the History of the 20th Century. I think the term I am looking for is 'learn from somebody elses mistakes'.

        Mr McBride, on the other hand, seems simply to want to profit from a lot of other peoples success - and after the lawsuit, we can hope that others learn from his mistake too.

        The mistake you made Mr McBride? You tried to fuck with the penguin. Do you know anything about charging Penguins, Mr McBride? No? Well, you are about to learn...

    • Re:Suspicious... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nolife ( 233813 )
      Maybe they were going to publish it themselves.

      "According to four of SCO's board members, Mcbride is a top five influential executive."

      They would be right. Influential meaning having or exercising influence. It does not have to be a "good" influence to be influential. Drugs use in public schools is influential, a neighborhood bully is influential and I fully agree, recently McBride has been very influential and acting like he is under the influence.

  • Hardened POS? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:27PM (#7158619)
    Mention was also made in the road map of ... SmallFoot, which is a "Retail Hardened POS solution" (their words, not mine).

    Since it is SCO, should we assume that POS stands for "Point of Sale"... ...or the other thing? :)
    • I always thought mcbride needed some stool softener...

    • Yes. POS is point of sale. Their "Retail Hardened POS solution" goes by a different name everwhere else...thin client.
    • Mention was also made in the road map of SmallFoot, which is a "Retail Hardened POS solution"


      Cool, I heard Pizza Hut was having trouble with customers carrying EMP weapons screwing up their machines.
      Or does it mean that the old system was easily damaged by retail? I don't get it.

  • Now I'm really mad that my brokerage account lacks the enourmous amounts of money to sell short. I'd make a killing on these small minded fools.

    • Re:DAMN!!!! (Score:5, Informative)

      by cmowire ( 254489 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:46PM (#7158749) Homepage
      You generally haven't been able to short much of it because there are more people who want to short it than stocks in the brokerages. Most of the shares are owned by either the Canopy Group of a few other folks. The short interest is *insane* on that stock -- as in maybe 15% of the shares out on the open market and not covered by the Canopy Group and such have been short-sold.

      • Re:DAMN!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by iabervon ( 1971 )
        Is this still true? I'd have thought the people interested in shorting SCOX would have realized that, while the stock is worthless in the long run, it's going to take a long time before it actually gets particularly low. Sure, if you happen to have sold short when SCO gets shut down, you'll do well, but until then the stock isn't going to go down much.
  • Mention was also made in the road map of a new online update service (big whoop), and SmallFoot, which is a "Retail Hardened POS solution" (their words, not mine). When did "you want fries with that?" become associated with the five 9's of reliability? For the live update, he actually walked us through how you would set up an account to use the service, another indication that SCOs internal force has missed the last couple of years of the Internet (how could this be interesting to anyone there?).

    You know

  • Why the delay in getting PAM? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ToadSprocket ( 628571 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:30PM (#7158635)
    Unfortunately for SCO, Darl heard the word "Pam" and had been looking for Pam Dawber of "Mork and Mindy" fame for the past several years. Apparently, Robin Williams wasn't returning his calls.

  • A minor nit... (Score:5, Informative)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:31PM (#7158637)
    I refrained from pointing out that pre/post-AMF Harley produced respected product, and did not send threatening letters to Yamaha owners ...

    Actually, Harley claimed to trademark the distinctive "potato,potato" sound of its engine and threated legal action when either Yamaha or Honda introduced an engine with the same cylinder timing and sound.

    • Re:A minor nit... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:56PM (#7158818)
      Actually, Harley claimed to trademark the distinctive "potato,potato" sound of its engine and threated legal action when either Yamaha or Honda introduced an engine with the same cylinder timing and sound.

      But they didn't get full coverage, so Harley's sound like poh-tah-toh-poh-tah-toh and the japanese bikes sound like poh-tay-toh-poh-tay-toh...

    • Re:A minor nit... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by grandpohbah ( 174190 )
      They also succesfully lobbied for high duties on import motorcycles... then in a completely unprecendented move, lobbied to have them reduced when it was clear that they were not going to go under. FWIW, Japan still has extrodinarially high duties on US made motorcycles.
    • Actually, Harley claimed to trademark the distinctive "potato,potato" sound of its engine and threated legal action when either Yamaha or Honda introduced an engine with the same cylinder timing and sound

      Are you making that up? And if not, did they ever actually sue anyone over their engine noise?
    • Actually, Harley claimed to trademark the distinctive "potato,potato" sound of its engine and threated legal action when either Yamaha or Honda introduced an engine with the same cylinder timing and sound.

      They also have a history of litigation against independant shops that work on Harleys and sell related stuff. Some shops have closed, which hurts Harley's customers, but I guess that's of small concern when compared to maintaining the integrity of their brand.

    • Gotcha (Score:4, Funny)

      by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @11:58PM (#7160054) Homepage
      "potatoe,potatoe"

      Sincerely

      Vice President

      Dan Quayle

  • SCO behind the times (Score:5, Funny)

    by hawkeyeMI ( 412577 ) <brock@brocELIOTktice.com minus poet> on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:31PM (#7158647) Homepage
    My favorite line, while not creative:
    The 80's called, they want their features back.
    heh...

  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Q-Cat5 ( 664698 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:32PM (#7158654)
    Sounds like I had more fun and got more concise and well presented information at that Timeshare seminar I went to. And I came out feeling far less ripped off, too.

    Maybe SCO should take some lessons from Hilton?

    Oh, wait, Hilton has an actual product to sell. Woops, my bad.

  • In case of /. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:32PM (#7158658)
    Notes from the SCO Road show

    I decided to go to the SCO "City to City Tour" (%s/City to City/Farewell/g) out of morbid curiosity - what did SCO say about itself? I was especially interested to see if the time allotted to "roadmap" would even mention shippable product (o; It was interesting - not exactly as I expected, but interesting nonetheless. Highly recommended.

    And apparently easy to attend. 64 seats, less than 20 attendees. Considering that when I applied I went to a waiting list, I was expecting a higher turnout ... it may be worth putting yourself on the list for future stops of the show ...

    Grandest cheese at the presentation was VP of Marketing, Jeff Hunsaker. He started out with an hour the company's report card & backgrounder. Here's the view of SCO painted: 330 employees, 2+ million deployed units (no mention of OS breakdown - would be interesting to see what % of that is Caldera Linux), target market is small-ish business. Reference accounts seem to be franchised fast food & drug oriented. Think Pizza Hut & Wallgreens (Arnold Clarke & Argos were UK references, Shoppers Drug thrown in for us Canuks). Nothing IT-intensive. Avaya & Lucent were mentioned on the laundry list, however no detail was given, and I cannot imagine descendants of AT&T paying too much to some guys in Utah for hideous product (searches on their sites for SCO only brings mention of their "Special Customer Operations" group).

    Oddly enough, market cap & stock price were mentioned extensively (who'd have thought?). Reference was made to using their capitalization as a means of acquisition; however no details were given (assuming there were any details to give). The fabled '2 quarters of profitability' was also mentioned. The name Caldera was dragged through the dirt, as they were never profitable. From the slides you'd think SCO had roots much, much deeper than the MS Xenix junk they spawned from. In fact, the analogy they whip out is that of Harley-Davidson (HD was purchased by AMF, went to hell, then arose re-branded as the mega-label you know today). I refrained from pointing out that pre/post-AMF Harley produced respected product, and did not send threatening letters to Yamaha owners ...

    Mention of the legal battle? Nothing technical. Representatives were up-front about their lack of legal knowledge, and inability to comment. It never got past the mud-slinging stage. Same old, same old. Their interest is in protecting their IP. This is about a breach of contract. Linux 2.4 code review shows Monterrey-esqe code relating to memory-access that must have come from AIX 5L. Caldera Linux customers are indemnified against legal action. Blah blah blah.

    Interesting bits?

    Their definition of IP (I've never seen a formal definition, and so some of the things on the list amused mildly): Copyright, Contracts, Methods, Trade Secrets, and Know-how (Know-how? How about "stuff we have" - can that be a IP subject too?). Their mention of McBride making some soon-to-be-published "top 5 influential executives list" (that'll be a keeper of an article). And heavy mention of HP's support. Reference was made to their web site removing their logo, however they emphatically associate SCOs current operations and HP's approval. Nothing to substantiate, however.

    Really interesting bits?

    The crowd. I was expecting Linux zealots. 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

  • From the article... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:33PM (#7158659) Homepage
    The other reason the roadmap was entertaining? 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.

    Hilarious! SCO is its own worst enemy.

    • And where do you guys think they are getting it from?

      The GPL'D! Linux kernel.

      Im putting money into that bet.... FSF, its time to go in for a BIG class action lawsuit now that they still have their money.

      Think about how they see this thing.

      "Linux is ours, so we can use it as we see fit"

      They are switching SCO *ix to Linux, thats how they are getting the cool new features.

      B A S T A R D S

    • Re:From the article... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JayBlalock ( 635935 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:43AM (#7160311)
      Simply put, I think this article ultimately tells us EXACTLY why they're embarking on this legal insanity. They have no viable product, they're hopefully behind technologically, and falling further behind every month, and their vendors are getting restless. So they're throwing a hail mary and hoping they can sue their largest competitor into nonexistance. If Linux goes away, they suddenly have a market again.

      • Re:From the article... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mcc ( 14761 )
        If Linux goes away, they suddenly have a market again.

        The funny thing is, not even that is the case. If Linux goes away people will switch to BSD. I talked to people who've administrated SCO UNIX before this whole lawsuit mess started. As far as messy, user-unfriendly, behind-the-times propeitary unices go, it is the worst.

        If every free OS in the world were somehow sued out of existence, people would flock to Solaris/x86 en masse before they'd even consider SCO UNIX.

  • Would have managed a more potent marketing ploy considering that they really don't have any product to be selling. They needed to be able to field technical questions, in detail, and were unable to. This hurts their credibility with those who oppose them.

    They needed to secure the support of their resellers, without whom they have no income, however basically it sounds like they snubbed them to their faces.

    And as a final pedantic note, we all know UNIX is in Linux. In case they forgot, they released System

    • The people who need to be impressed (those who are interested in buying or selling SCO stock in large numbers) don't go to those sort of roadshows.

      They don't need the resellers to pump-and-dump, so they are just grabbing whatver pennies that they can get out of there until they can hit the jackpot.

  • If you're interested in going... (Score:4, Informative)

    by ragingmime ( 636249 ) <ragingmimeNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:34PM (#7158673) Homepage
    ...ther are still a bunch of stops on the tour that will be going on. Admission is free, and there's more information here [sco.com]. They'll be all over the US, as well as in British Columbia. Maybe someone can stop by and say "hi" to the SCO folks. :)

  • intellectual property (Score:5, Informative)

    by penguin7of9 ( 697383 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:36PM (#7158681)
    Their definition of IP (I've never seen a formal definition, and so some of the things on the list amused mildly): Copyright, Contracts, Methods, Trade Secrets, and Know-how (Know-how? How about "stuff we have" - can that be a IP subject too?).

    Well, they can define "intellectual property" however they want to--the term has no legal significance. "Intellectual property" is merely a collective (and misleading) term to refer generally to certain intagible rights. Copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets each have a specific legal status, specific obligations, and specific enforceable rights.

    The term "intellectual property" is actually quite misleading (and this is no doubt a deliberate choice by many of the people using the term) because those rights work very differently from other property rights. For example, they expire. You should think of them more as a temporary contract between you and the government, a kind of non-renewable "lease".

  • Can't wait to see if this will get /. ed... (Score:3, Funny)

    by pdaoust007 ( 258232 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:37PM (#7158690)
    Sympatico being the largest Canadian ISP, I've always wondered if one of their servers could survive the /. effect. I guess we'll find out!
  • (searches on their sites for SCO only brings mention of their "Special Customer Operations" group)

    S(anta|pecial) Cr*u(stomer|z) Operations*

  • Acquisition using Cap not possible (Score:5, Informative)

    by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:38PM (#7158699) Homepage
    Reference was made to using their capitalization as a means of acquisition

    This is not possible with the exception of companies already owned by the Canopy group.

    Any company has a fiduciary duty to their stockholders even privately owned.

    Any company that accepted this POS (Not Point of Purchase) will open themselves to lawsuit. Any Due diligence will not pass muster.

    There is nothing for the acuired company to be gained. The shares can not be sold, their non Legal business has all but disapeared so no synergy and the like can be had, Nothing as far as I can see.

    • Aye, but it sounds good on the road show and probably won't get them in more trouble with the SEC than they already will hopefully be in for running a pump-and-dump. ;)

    • Re:Acquisition using Cap not possible (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Chemicalscum ( 525689 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @09:16PM (#7158940) Journal
      Yes - but this is how the Canopy/SCO scam works - The Vultus purchase was the first one

      SCO purchases a Canopy company with newly created shares at a nominal value (yes they have provision for a massive share expansion). The Canopy shareholders - ie Noorda and Yarro then sell the SCO stock at its market price and make a killing.

      A worthless Canopy company has been turned into a fortune in cash and the suckers who have been paying through their nose to buy SCO stock have been defrauded.

      So it goes.

      • SCO purchases a Canopy company with newly created shares at a nominal value (yes they have provision for a massive share expansion). The Canopy shareholders - ie Noorda and Yarro then sell the SCO stock at its market price and make a killing.

        Exactly what I was thinking yesterday when I was looking at SCO's stock value [yahoo.com].
        I thought "Hey, it looks like the shit is working to inflate the price, maybe I should buy a few and have some easy money."

        But then the little deamon on my shoulder told me "Stupid, you

  • .. "against legal action". That's what they state. Well, legal action of SCO perhaps but not of, say, the FSF or Linus for breaching the GPL.

    IIUC, they waivered their IP claims (not copyrights) when contributing to Linux, notably on or around the technologies that have been named so far. So if they don't abide the license or claim it's void that would immediately force them to face copyright issues with the Linux kernel and any other GPL package they've had in OpenLinux or UnixWare.

    So where's the GPL lice

  • Best. Quote. Ever. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:41PM (#7158713)
    "The 80's called, they want their features back."
  • All of SCO's executives, from King Darl on down, just keep charging forward, as if everything they're doing and saying makes perfect sense. It's almost like some sort of wierd Saturday Night Live parody of a business.

    • Feels more like something from the set of Sliders. Things that make perfect sense in one Universe are just too bizarre for words in another. I have to wonder if McBride and his crew came in through some extradimensional portal and are just behaving normally.
  • I should have mentioned earlier that it's good to hear SCO resellers being very sceptical.

    Brains are not easily engineered into WOC (Wake On Command) luckily.
  • what bone/s did they throw out to convince these guys they were (still) on a good thing?

    I mean, the resellers are business people - they must be hearing grumbles from their customer base and getting worried as a result. At least some of their customers must be making noises about going somewhere else for their systems.

    What nice story did SCO have to tell them? "We're suing everyone" doesn't help those guys a bit

  • Disturbing side to their "GPL is invalid" ravings (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr.Dubious DDQ ( 11968 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @08:51PM (#7158783) Homepage
    From the article:
    Also of note was the volume of OpenSource software in the box - OpenSSL/SSH, Apache, Samba, CUPS, Gimp-print, bash ... you name it.

    Isn't most or all of that released as GPL? The "invalid" license? Does SCO intend to claim that the GPL's alleged invalidity means the software is "license-free" and therefore they can do whatever they want with it? Perhaps they assume that nobody associated with free software can afford to sue them for copyright infringement...

    • > Perhaps they assume that nobody associated with
      > free software can afford to sue them for copyright
      > infringement...

      I keep waiting for that to happen - the author of some piece of OSS suing SCO for licence infringement.

      There must be at least one OSS author that's reasonably wealthy and could afford to do this, with or without the backing of e.g. the EFF. Chance has to be good that at least one OSS person made a fortune somewhere, somehow, ...

      • Re:Disturbing side to their "GPL is invalid" ravin (Score:4, Insightful)

        by rgmoore ( 133276 ) * <glandauer@charter.net> on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @09:39PM (#7159073) Homepage
        I keep waiting for that to happen - the author of some piece of OSS suing SCO for licence infringement.

        It's happened. There's this company you might have heard of called International Business Machines [slashdot.org] that has sued SCO for copyright infringement on their code in the Linux Kernel. They even registered the copyright, so SCO is liable for statutory damages. Interestingly, it looks as though it's no longer possible to download the kernel source from the SCO website, which suggests that their lawyers are worried. (I was going to suggest that people download the sources in order to drive up SCO's liability, but it looks as though they thought of that, too.)

        Importantly, though, that doesn't have any bearing on any other software under the GPL. The fact that SCO has violated the license on Linux does not prevent them from distributing any other GPLed software. Otherwise they probably would have been sued by several other Free Software developers. ISTR that the SAMBA team is particularly pissed at them and would love a legitimate excuse for preventing them from including SAMBA in their Unix line.

    • Re:Disturbing side to their "GPL is invalid" ravin (Score:5, Funny)

      by Erwos ( 553607 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @09:10PM (#7158907)
      Thank you!

      I've been saying this all along: the worst thing that SCO for themselves could do is render the GPL invalid. They'd IMMEDIATELY open themselves up to a million lawsuits of death from irate copyright holders, a few of whom do have the money to kick the snot out of SCO (IBM, RedHat, and SGI come to mind).

      "The GPL is invalid!"
      "That so? Stop shipping my code. Now. I wrote that code, the copyright reverts to me."
      "Uh, we own it! The GPL is invalid, and therefore, all GPL'd code belongs to us, because we said so!"
      "I think not." (lawsuit filed)
      Take that last line, multiply it by a million, and you'd see what would happen to SCO if the GPL was declared invalid. These people have honest-to-G-d, actual damages to claim. The GPL might die, but a dead SCO would be put right on top of its body.

      -Erwos
    • Disturbing Hypothetical Business plan:

      1. SCO gets court ruling that GPL is invalid.
      2. Now nobody can ship Linux. Bill Gates sez "W00T!"
      3. SCO stock falls to 0.01 since they can't ship Linux either.
      4. Darl and pals quietly buy all outstanding shares.
      5. Mysterious strangers who can't be tied to Microsoft now
      exercise previous options to buy SCO stock at $15/share.
      Darl sez "WOOT!" and retires to Ibiza.

  • ... because it only fuels the share price pump up.
    This means that the innocents of the world will lose even more money when this particular worthless 'House of Cards' inevitably comes tumbling down. In most juristictions of the world this SCO lark is considered illegal. Why does /. want to aid and abet this fraud?

  • We should *all* go to this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by puzzled ( 12525 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @09:10PM (#7158908) Journal

    I think its a six hour drive to the one nearest to me, but I should go just to ask pointed questions. I'm more or less enjoying my eighteenth year of Unix use (BSD on Vax 11/780 ... I feel old) and I'd like to see these creeps get the lawsuits & criminal charges they so richly deserve.

    I doubt if most ./ers remember, but in the mid 1980s we roundly cursed SCO for being the only Intel hardware unix and being out of reach price wise, and we cheered when MWC's Coherent became available, even if it was constrained to 64k of code and 64k of data per application.

    SCO ignored what people needed for a long, long time, and agreeing to be the punching bag in M$'s proxy war against Linux is the last gasp of the last for pay unix workalike on intel hardware. BSDi went quietly, Sun & SGI are going to kick and fuss ... just watch and see what happens.

  • Nice write-up, except for... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blincoln ( 592401 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @09:10PM (#7158909) Homepage Journal
    Mention was also made in the road map of a new online update service (big whoop), and SmallFoot, which is a "Retail Hardened POS solution" (their words, not mine). When did "you want fries with that?" become associated with the five 9's of reliability?

    I know that a lot of IT workers are out of touch with the retail industry, but this seems a little arrogant.

    Designing a stable, reliable point-of-sale system for long-term use (because retail corporations tend to replace POS systems on the order of once every twenty years) is a huge challenge. I'm involved with a project like that now.

    Cash registers are where the money comes into a retail corporation. If they're broken because the designer figured that 80% reliability was good enough, then you don't take in money that day, or you use a notepad, pen, and manual credit card imprinter. A lot of your customers will walk out your door and down the street to someone who bought a better system.

    The POS system we're replacing was bought in 1983. The servers are the size of washing machines and have 8.5" disk drives. They're still running. How many of you are working on systems you expect to last that long?

    I'm not saying that SCO's system is any good, just that I've noticed a tendency for tech geeks not to understand why making a good POS system is a challenge, and something you'd want to mention as an achievement.

  • Suggestion for question to ask at SCO roadshow (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChangeOnInstall ( 589099 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @09:13PM (#7158928)
    If anyone's going, I'd be interested in hearing their response to a particular question. When they start talking about the new color printing features provided by Gimp-Print, and their inclusion of Apache HTTPD, Samba, CUPS, and OpenSSH/OpenSSL, ask the following:

    "You are stating that you will be including a lot of open-source software within future versions of your operating systems. SCO is on the record for making many statements to the effect that such open-source software is undoubtedly built with stolen intellectual property. If this is true then using an SCO OS puts my business at risk, whether or not you indmenify your customers from direct litigation. What reason do you have to believe that these products are legitimate, while Linux is not?

    Probably would best be compacted a bit, but you get the point. I may have to sign up for the Irvine show just to ask that!

  • Remove Unixware support (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SteveOU ( 541402 ) <sbishop20&cox,net> on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @09:20PM (#7158960)

    "Also of note was the volume of OpenSource software in the box - OpenSSL/SSH, Apache, Samba, CUPS, Gimp-print, bash..."

    If SCO is this dependent on OSS software, they are more vulnerable than I gave them credit for. A cohesive effort to remove support for Unixware might do them in. Sure...they have the source code and could re-add support, but it would be expensive for them, and they aren't going to be able to maintain that kind of payroll. So how about it - how hard would it be to break support for SCO platforms? I mean, sure, I feel bad for existing Unixware users, but it would almost be doing them a favor to force them onto a modern OS

    • The problem with intentionally removing support for one OS is that you're never really sure how many OTHER OS's it's going to effect.

      A better effect would be to announce that no MORE support will be done for a particular OS, and just let it atrophy.

    • Re:Remove Unixware support (Score:5, Interesting)

      by benjamindees ( 441808 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:25AM (#7160217) Homepage
      As someone who's worked on SCO systems, I'd say that would be the best thing anyone has ever done for SCO users. There isn't a single SCO application provider that hasn't already started supporting Linux.

      People joke about the ancient feature-set of current SCO products, but even the stability and reliability of what's SCO offers is something out of the mid-nineties. (As in, mid-nineties *Microsoft* software)

      Most of SCO's customers, being small-scale retail/manufacturing, generally have little or no IT support and only know as much as their (overpriced) SCO crack-dealers tell them. I'd bet that most of them are still running serial terminals.

  • About publicising SCO dealings (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grahamlee ( 522375 ) <graham@[ ]leeg.com ['iam' in gap]> on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @09:27PM (#7159003) Homepage Journal

    I know this is going to sound like flamebait, and if you feel it is then be my guest in using the moderation system to let me, and everyone else, know.

    Where SCO press is concerned, Do Not Feed The Troll. SCO are undoubtedly revelling in the fact that every time their marketing droids put pen to paper, their output is mirrored on /., newsforge, linux.com and any number of similar sites. I expect they use this coverage to show their investors how seriously the community takes SCO's business, and how the Linux-using and Open Source Software communities are incredibly worried about the fact that 'they stole SCO IP and used it in their anti-competitive software'. In short, SCO profit from the coverage, and Darl McBride's worth increases with every SCO post on /..

    We as a community should not be furthering this action. SCO proved long ago that their statements do very little to reflect reality, and that they are not averse to publishing absurd comments in order to try and gain a few share points. Indeed, at the time IBM showed us what a large organisation of UNIX-types should do in such a situation; they ignored SCO. SGI have since taken a similar approach. However, regular statements by ESR and others, alongside frequent coverage on sites such as this or Newsforge, have shown that the Open Source community cannot help but to rise to a troll's bait.

    This may be because of the lack of centralisation of the community, i.e. there is no single mouthpiece from which views are aired. Whereas IBM or the like can carefully control the statements issued by its press department, should someone like ESR decide to express their opinion on a subject, it is erroneously considered to represent the wishes and views of the community as a whole. Now while I'm not advocating restrictions to free speech, I do think that such publications or announcements should be self-vetted to consider whether or not they are helping the very people who wish to harm our winderfully open community.

    In summary, as I said at the top, SCO are trolls. Please do not feed them in the future.

  • From the article (Score:4, Informative)

    by cdrudge ( 68377 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @09:39PM (#7159072) Homepage
    Here's the view of SCO painted: 330 employees, 2+ million deployed units (no mention of OS breakdown - would be interesting to see what % of that is Caldera Linux), target market is small-ish business. Reference accounts seem to be franchised fast food & drug oriented. Think Pizza Hut & Wallgreens
    I know McDonalds runs their stores on OpenServer. I beleive that CVS is the drugstore, but I may be mixing my references.

  • Avaya, Lucent, and Walgreens (Score:5, Informative)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Tuesday October 07, 2003 @09:46PM (#7159100) Journal
    Avaya is mostly based out of Colorado and yes, they have SCO on a number of past products. They are also in a hurry to remove it and move forward with Linux, not SCO.
    I have heard that Lucent is doing the same from some of my contacts.
    That will kill the use of original Unix in the company that created it (ATT).
    Walgreens is an IBM client. Last I heard of 2 years ago, they in-house coders were wanting to switch, but IBM was kind of holding them back. Hopefully, now, IBM will push the change to Linux

    These are huge accounts for SCO, so it is almost certain that they will lose at least 25% of their business in the next year.
    • Oops on the Walgreens then. There was mention of a US drug chain on their list... sorry for not making a specific note.

      In their defence, they did in fact have a decent sized list of cutomers, just no list of decent customers (where bleeding edge IT is concerned). I went into this with little SCO background, and was expecting something ... bigger. Their size really hit home at this thing. How they can call an OS that's run on some of the world's fastest boxes [top500.org] immature is now reely reely reely beyond me (wher

      • Re:Avaya, Lucent, and Walgreens (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Avaya does indeed use SCO OpenServer...specifically on nasty things like the Audix voicemail system (think baby Octel). However, as of the last time my salesmonkey tried to get me to Buy Cool Stuff, all of the Definity/MultiVantage/Communication Manager/Whatever it's called this week uses Linux of some form. And since these are the products that actually get hard use...probably a good hint there.
      • no, I think that you were right.
        IIRC, it is walgreens. But, it is serviced by IBM. IBM was not in a hurry back then, to get customers off of a working (and paying) system. It was their customer drug database. Not one to be triffled with. But I am quite certain that IBM has made the choice to move by now (I need to talk to some of my old co-workers to find out).
        As to the list of customers, yeah, they have a large list, but they also know that all (or nearly all) of their customers are busy moving off of th
  • The crowd. I was expecting Linux zealots. It was mostly a room full of SCO resellers.

    We, Mac zealots, are more zealous :)

  • "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?".

    Maybe it was my undersexed mind, but I had some image of a desparate SCO exec trying to fuck a girl from behind and then yelling "Finally!" when he actually got it in there. -non sig all your linux belong to us-
  • I read the title as "Notes From The SCO Roadshow's First post" and thought " wow! they are sending out information through FP!!".

  • Questions to ask SCO (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Wednesday October 08, 2003 @12:05AM (#7160100) Homepage
    The good folks over at Groklaw [groklaw.com]are putting together a list of questions for the Media to ask SCO

    If you attend some of the future SCO roadshow maybe ask a few of the ones that they have come up with

    Second: If you have any questions that you think needs to be included post it over at Groklaw.

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