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Caldera Software Linux

Caldera/SCO Co-Founder Ransom Love Speaks 198

Posted by michael from the still-taking-his-medication-for-the-moment dept.
securitas writes "CNet has published an interview with Caldera (now SCO Group) co-founder Ransom Love, in which he talks about the Novell acquisition of SuSE, Novell's Linux history, the early history of Caldera, the SCO-IBM lawsuit, his new role at Progeny and open standards. It's a good read that covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space."
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Caldera/SCO Co-Founder Ransom Love Speaks More

Caldera/SCO Co-Founder Ransom Love Speaks

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  • "Ransom Love" is such a cool name. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So much better than "Elmer Snodgrass" -- the
    unfairness of it all!

  • what? no SCO is teh suxors comments yet? seriously, this sheds a lot of light on the current situation.

  • WTF (Score:3, Insightful)

    by frodo from middle ea ( 602941 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @03:48PM (#7531089) Homepage
    They could have owned Linux

    Owned linux ?, Last time I checked nobody owned , owns or never will own linux, not even linus. Isn't that open source is all about ?

    • You're missing the point. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ikeya ( 7401 )
      "They could have owned Linux" was said in regards to the fact that Novell could have been a huge player and market leader in the Linux market.

      ikeya

      • Re:You're missing the point. (Score:5, Funny)

        by Wireless Joe ( 604314 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:04PM (#7531226) Homepage
        I think he meant, "They could have 0WN3D Linux."

      • Re:You're missing the point. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by rifter ( 147452 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:06PM (#7531235) Homepage

        "They could have owned Linux" was said in regards to the fact that Novell could have been a huge player and market leader in the Linux market.

        I'm not so sure about that. I think Ransom Love really thinks they could have owned Linux. After all it was him that started Caldera on the road against Linux in the first place, by trying to charge per-user connection licenses to connect to a Caldera Linux server and trying to make SCO UNIXware and Caldera the same product by mingling the codebases.

        • In light of this quote, I'm inclined to agree with you: (Caldera began discussing) what we can do through UnitedLinux to indemnify people who had used both Unix and Linux. Apparently, Darl took that in a little different direction than we intended. Apparently, Ransom also thinks that there is some sort of legal reconciliation necessary for people using Linux and UNIX.

          • Re:You're missing the point. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by edhall ( 10025 ) <slashdot@weirdnoise.com> on Friday November 21, 2003 @06:08PM (#7532506) Homepage

            I think this is in reference to the System V/Linux compatibility library Caldera had developed, which was based on System V code and allowed System V software to run on Linux. (Last I checked, SCO was still marketing this product.) They wanted to make it so that the only way to run System V software on Linux was to license this library. ("Sure, you can drop SCO for Linux while preserving your software base, but it will cost you...")

            Even this is controversial since it relies on the claim that the independent re-implementations of the System V ABI (which both Linux and BSD had) were illegal. But McBride and Company thought they could take this a whole lot farther, as we've seen...

            -Ed
        • I'm not so sure about that. I think Ransom Love really thinks they could have owned Linux. After all it was him that started Caldera on the road against Linux in the first place, by trying to charge per-user connection licenses to connect to a Caldera Linux server and trying to make SCO UNIXware and Caldera the same product by mingling the codebases.

          Being charitable to Mr. Love-- I am assuming that he means that Novell could have essentially owned the enterprise Linux marketplace (like RedHat does today

    • Free (Score:1)

      by IFF123 ( 679162 )
      In their perspective open source software is free, but as in "free for the taking".
      I bet that his quote of "could have owning Linux" will be presented by McBribe as "UNDENIABLE PROOF" of Linux belonging to them.

    • Re:WTF (Score:4, Informative)

      by MoxCamel ( 20484 ) * on Friday November 21, 2003 @03:54PM (#7531143)
      Owned linux ?, Last time I checked nobody owned , owns or never will own linux, not even linus. Isn't that open source is all about ?

      You're reading it too literally. He means "owned," as in, owned the market space. Much like Red Hat currently "owns" the Enterprise Linux space.

    • Re:WTF (Score:2, Funny)

      by gmhowell ( 26755 )
      Owned mindshare, like RedHat. Or perhaps they meant 0\/\/N3D.

  • "I hired Darl, then realized what a HUGE mistake that was, so I quit SCO and sold my shares and Debian is really cool, thanks guys!"

  • Interesting names... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 21, 2003 @03:48PM (#7531095)
    "Ransom Love"? "Darl McBride"?
    I'm beginning to see some sort of pattern here...

  • Decent (Score:1, Interesting)

    by ActionPlant ( 721843 )
    This DOES shed some good light. I would like to get a better picture of just who the hell SCO thinks they are in their recent "let's sue EVERYONE!" kick, but I appreciated the perspective. I've heard a lot from the other companies; it's good to hear from the troublemakers and get a good idea where they're coming from.

    Damon,

    • Re:Decent (Score:3, Informative)

      by NickFitz ( 5849 )

      From the article:

      Love left in 2002, before the company renamed itself SCO Group and launched a legal attack on IBM and the open-source operating system.

      You'll have to try elsewhere to "hear from the troublemakers".

      • Re:Decent (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        No. Caldera was always the Linux company that didn't "get it" the most. They wanted to own Linux. Love says it in this article that he thought Novell could own Linux. He was prescient is seeing a bright future for Linux and he thought he could chain up that star and then hitch his wagon to it. He helped create this monster.

  • If anyone is going to set the standard for Linux (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 21, 2003 @03:50PM (#7531103)
    It will probably be Novell, since they have the resources to push their offerings. They like IBM are fully embracing Linux and probably succeed.
    • "I think where this could work is in the area of standards. It comes back to the Linux Standard Base. Maybe Novell can expand that so it doesn't care what's underneath. As long as applications can install and function, then Linux can truly be a platform." If Novell could make their GNU/Linux software conform to the LSB and run on any LSB compliant distro then..... However the Ximian product of Novell is VERY particular on what distro it gets installed on. Mandrake 9.1 is Ok but 9.2 is not OK.

  • I'm torn.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 )
    ...I want to know how this will all end... but am sick of hearing all the scwabbling that is going on...

    I could turn off stories about Caldera to just get it off my front page....
    But, then I can miss it when something major happens...

    Or I can whine in bitch in the article....

    I'll chose the latter, I suppose :-P
    • Why the return to the ancient .sig?

      Is Dayton still with us?
    • Yeah, it sucks alright. Especially with that squad of goons that slashdot dispatches to everyone's house to force you to click on each and every SCO story. If only there was some way... some possibility of, oh I don't know, free will -- the ability to actually not click on the links we don't like! I know, it sounds crazy. But I'm convinced that there's a way, a possibilty. It must exist.

  • Long-standing issues ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @03:51PM (#7531114) Journal
    I wasn't surprised about the lawsuit against IBM because there were longstanding issues we weren't able to resolve with IBM.

    This was interesting - it's the first I've heard of a long-standing disagreement with IBM. The SCO press I've seen so far has presented it as a "We've just discovered this" rather than a "We've been trying for years to rationalise this". I'm surprised they're not taking the latter path, it would look better from a PR perspective. Must be legal reasons, I suppose.

    Simon

  • interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zeruch ( 547271 ) <zeruch.deviantart@com> on Friday November 21, 2003 @03:51PM (#7531120) Homepage
    ...in that it offers some mildly engaging history, but not much else. The phrase that bothers me is:

    it's so ironic, the turn of events. (Caldera began discussing) what we can do through UnitedLinux to indemnify people who had used both Unix and Linux. Apparently, Darl took that in a little different direction than we intended.

    I can't tell if thats Ransome indicting Darl or simply distancing himself from the brouhaha.
    • The part you quoted made me chuckle.

      indemnify

      To protect against damage, loss, or injury; insure.
      To make compensation to for damage, loss, or injury suffered.

      I'd say doing the complete opposite of indemnify Linux users qualifies as "a little different" :)

    • Yes, it bothers me too. That and his comment that Linux needed Novell, and his comment regarding the IBM lawsuit leads me to think that Love believes SCO's claims have merit -- which they do not.

      But, on the plus side ... Love also seems to believe that Novell has sufficient rights to the old Unix code base and that they can effectively indemnify Linux users. Perhaps that could be a fall back position in case the courts do something stupid. Regardless, it is another reason to believe that SCO is toast.

  • What Love wisely leaves out... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by YU Nicks NE Way ( 129084 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @03:57PM (#7531159)
    Is that he and his management team burned through many tens of millions of dollars worth of venture capital, along with a significant portion of the original Microsoft settlement, and, in the end, had nothing to show for it. The venture capital org behind Caldera (Canopy, remember them?) finally wised up, threw out Love's team, and put it a disaster recovery team.

    Caldera/SCO may or may not have any legal basis for when they're doing now, but they've certainly got a better plan that Love's gang of Underpants Gnomes did...

    • Re:What Love wisely leaves out... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sjvn ( 11568 ) <sjvn AT vna1 DOT com> on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:26PM (#7531402) Homepage
      No, as someone who's followed the history of both SCO and Caldera, before and after their merger, I'd say Caldera's troubles had a lot more to do with IBM leaving them in the lurch with Project Monterey; the slow growth of all dedicated Linux businesses--remember even Red Hat only recently turned a profit; and the reasons that Love gives in the interview.

      Had Love stayed on, I think Caldera/SCO was well on its way to righting itself. And, by now, its stock price would be about what it is today.

      Shocking? Not really. Something almost everyone forgets, today's SCO stock price should be divided by four when comparing it to Caldera's bad days. Just before Love left, in May 2002 Caldera had a four to one reverse stock split. Thus, today's SCO price of $13.50 is equal to a Aug. 2001 (Caldera acquires SCO) to May 2002 (4/1 split) price of $3.38. For all the stock excitement SCO has generated, by 'long' measurement, McBride's team still hasn't done that much for the stock. That may explain why they're still so focused on winning at any cost.

      But had Love stayed, this would have been ironic, I'm quite sure Caldera/SCO, not SuSE, would now be being acquired by Novell.

      Steven
      • Even granting your bizarre thesis about Monterey, that doesn't make the original Underpants Gnomes look any better. The SCO acquisition took place on Ransom Love's watch, not on Darl McBride's. More than that, the Monterey debacle happened between the time that Caldera expressed its interest in purchasing the system dev assets of SCO and the time the deal closed. Why didn't Love pull out? SCO had no viable prospects without Monterey, and yet Caldera bought the husk anyway? Whose fault is that if not Lo

  • I'm confused... (Score:4, Funny)

    by mazarin5 ( 309432 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:05PM (#7531227) Journal
    Is Ransom his name or business strategy??? (Sounds like a cheap anime character...)

  • Just how well did Ransom know Darl? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by overbyj ( 696078 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:08PM (#7531260)
    The article mentions that Love knew Darl from Novell and brought him on board at Caldera/SCO. Does anybody know what Darl did at Novell? I just wonder what was going through Ransom's head when he decided to hire Darl. Was Darl this superstar executive at Novell or was he the one that was always telling Novell "hey, our IP is being infringed somewhere, let's get on the suing bandwagon"?

    I am just wondering what the legacy of Darl was at Novell that made him so suited to be CEO of some company that has morphed into one of the most hated entities in the IT world?

  • Facinating "if's" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by downix ( 84795 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:17PM (#7531321) Homepage
    Hindsight is always 20/20.

    If only IBM pushed OS/2 onto the desktop
    If only Commodore could market their way out of a paper bag
    If only Atari hadn't fumbled the desktop
    and now:
    if only Novell had pushed for Linux rather than UNIX in the 90's...
    • Hindsight is always 20/20.

      If only IBM pushed OS/2 onto the desktop
      If only Commodore could market their way out of a paper bag
      If only Atari hadn't fumbled the desktop
      and now:
      if only Novell had pushed for Linux rather than UNIX in the 90's...
      Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.

      How about "If only Mr McBride had used a condom"

      I know, I know, -1 Troll... Oh go on then, guilty as charged
    • Well to be fair, many of us were screaming at IBM to market OS/2 properly at the time. It was tragic to watch them utterly blow it in real time.
      • Oh so true. Windows 95 came out and IBM's response was to increase the price and discontinue the preloads of OS/2. Another blunders included replacing the good and inexpensive CSet/2 compiler with the good but insanely expensive VisualAge compiler.

        But this really wasn't marketing, but corporate schizophrenia instead. OS/2, the PC, VisualAge, and LotusWorks, all were in divisions separated by inviolate walls of corporate structure. Imagine those four combined into a single attractive price...
    • * if only I had bought tonnes M$ shares decades ago
      * if only I registered domain names like beer.com and cnn.com before the internet became really big
      * if only I had saved more money from the dotcom days

    • Re:Facinating "if's" (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Art Tatum ( 6890 )
      If only Atari hadn't fumbled the desktop

      Or NeXT. At least they've gotten redemption for some of their better technologies in Mac OS X and Cocoa.

    • If only Atari hadn't fumbled the desktop

      As a longtime user of Atari, they never fumbled the desktop. GEM was used by Atari as a cheap alternative/response to the MacOS. GEM [geocities.com] had promise, but was declawed by an Apple suit. Although the suit didn't directly change Atari's version of GEM, it did stunt its growth (mostly over fear of a lawsuit from Apple). The value of the ST was the cheap price, easy API, and multitude of ports for such a low price. Very little time was spent on the desktop UI and OS, a

      • Re: Facinating "if's" (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gidds ( 56397 )
        Some of us stuck with Atari past that. Most of the utilities you mention weren't needed when alternate OSs, notably MagiC, came along. (A surprisingly advanced system - full pre-emptive multitasking even on apps written for the original single-tasking OS, full memory protection (on supporting hardware) ditto, and with a few subtleties that I've never seen elsewhere. For example, far better GUI-terminal integration than anything else I've seen.)

        But it's true that Atari dropped the ball. Commodore broug

      • Re:Facinating "if's" (Score:2, Interesting)

        by downix ( 84795 )
        That is actually what I was referring to. Atari had a tremendous leap over the Amiga in the low-cost desktop space. Atari licensed CP/M with its GUI, GEM, and did not defend either when Apple came a calling. (Turned out several years later that Atari had patents that Apple was violating, and could have used them to leveredge against a possible anti-GEM suit)

        The ST had the jumpstart on software, but Atari for whatever reason never exploited it. What was even more tragic from my viewpoint was their use o

    • Re:Facinating "if's" (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mandolin ( 7248 )
      if only Novell had pushed for Linux rather than UNIX in the 90's...

      It would have taken a psychic, not just foresight. Novell decided to acquire USL in February '93. Linux 1.0 wasn't released until March '94, and it was (comparatively speaking!) a toy.

      If even Novell had known, I don't see how they could have helped Linux in the timeframe they were looking for. Like Mozilla, you knew it would eventually kick ass, but the schedule has a mind of its own.

    • add to your list:

      If only NeXT had an affordable x86 OS in the early and mid 90s...
      If only Netscape had debugged...
      If only HP stuck to developing their software... (openview, others)

      The list goes on.

  • Analysis (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Proteus ( 1926 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:24PM (#7531380) Homepage Journal

    My first thought, upon reading this article, is that it really bears little relevance to the SCO-IBM suit. Mr. Love is no longer with SCO, and appears to have chosen to pursue more traditional UNIX flavors over Linux.

    However, on further thinking this over, I realize that Mr. Love has a unique perspective: he understands how SCO conducts its business, but he has the objectivity of an outsider. Consider this:

    "
    I wasn't surprised about the lawsuit against IBM because there were longstanding issues we weren't able to resolve with IBM."
    It would appear, then, that Mr. Love is suggesting that the lawsuit in question is a vengence tactic - a way to attack IBM for 'unresolved issues'.

    Mr. Love also strike a rather insidious blow at SCO's choice of filing such a major lawsuit:

    "
    I lived through the Microsoft suit at Caldera (in which Caldera sued Microsoft over the DOS operating system), and those things take on a life of their own. They consume a business. When it first came out my biggest concern--we had done work to get SCO to a position where it was profitable, then they got themselves embroiled in this major lawsuit, and I just new it was going to go south. That's when we--my wife and I--sold our shares."
    Notice how Mr. Love implies that lawsuits (and, by context and implication this lawsuit), are bad for SCO; he further indicates that selling SCO stock might be a wise idea, by relating his own decision to sell. If SCO et al still take Mr. Love seriously, they are likely to review how to continue without either giving up the lawsuit (which would look bad to investors, as it is an implied admission of error) or continuing down a fatal path.

    Given the slim chance of SCO actually winning this lawsuit, it makes one wonder what their strategy is; it all must come down to how will it affect the stock?

    • "If SCO et al still take Mr. Love seriously"
      I actually can't wait to see what Darl spouts about this interview. I wonder if he's going to spin it as "Love is on our side" or "Love f***ed us and you shouldn't listen to him". Darl has been so reactionary that I don't think he can resist issuing some sort of statement about this interview or bring it up in one of his own "interviews". How long do you think it will take until Love gets his subpeona?
    • ...I just
      new it was going to go south.
      Have the /. editors gone to work for cnet?

  • saddening replies (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Seq ( 653613 )
    Sadly, it doesnt appear some people are even reading the article before basing Mr. Love. If they were to scroll down to the first paragraph, they might actually get something:

    But Love left in 2002, before the company renamed itself SCO Group and launched a legal attack on IBM and the open-source operating system.

  • Ransom Love Speaks

    How is this... new?
    This guy speaks about as frequently as RMS proclaims the virtues of open source.

    • Um, RMS proclaims the virtues of open source not at all these days. He proclaims the purist virtues of Free Software, and denounces the advocates of Open Source as lacking in moral principle.

  • This guy is a loser, folks. He wasted millions and millions of dollars that investors gave to him on some half-cocked pipe-dream. He had no real business model. This guy really defaulted on all of his moral and legal obligations to his shareholders.
  • "Ransom Love" is almost enough said on its own.

    Love is Knowledge is Light.

    That is, the more you learn, and the more you become a conduit of knowledge, the closer you come to understanding 'love' --which is meant in a sense above and beyond hormones and bad 'Friends' episodes. It's Light side versus Dark side.

    Now you're probably wincing like mad right now, and frankly, so am I. The New-Age bullshit has scarred everybody. Indeed, if a New-Ager uses the term, 'Love & Light' it is usually best to run.

  • Off-topic, but very interesting (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Knights who say 'INT ( 708612 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:41PM (#7531539) Journal
    Linked in a sidebar in that article's website, there's this interesting interview with Billy Gates on Linux [com.com].


    If you want a quote to startle your appetite, here it goes:

    Five years ago it would have been Windows versus OS/2. A few years before, it would have been Windows versus Macintosh. Before, maybe it would have been C/PM 86, and before that, maybe CP/M 80. There's always been some challenger to the operating system. Linux--which is only a kernel--is not where the interesting stuff is going on nowadays.


    I should really have submitted this as a main page story, as my karma really needs some help since I've started being realistic on the LG business.

    • "...The IT systems are your brain. If you take your brain and outsource it then any adaptability you want (becomes) a contract negotiation....

      Oh the irony.

      "..Linux--which is only a kernel--is not where the interesting stuff is going on nowadays...."

      Right. Look at all the innovation on WIndows.

  • 0wn3d! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LMCBoy ( 185365 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:53PM (#7531702) Homepage Journal
    I'd be interested to know in what sense Mr. Love thinks that Novell could have "owned" Linux, had they played their cards right.

    If he meant that literally, it's mind-boggling that someone could have been an executive for Linux-related companies for so many years, and still have absolutely no clue about it.

    But hey, I've learned not to underestimate this guy in the cluelessness department.

  • is that a stage name? (Score:3, Funny)

    by mooface ( 674033 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:59PM (#7531788)
    Ransom Love? That sounds like some sort of soft-core star, or the title of an 80s movie that repeatedly shows on the TNT network...

  • Despite the Name jokes, (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Artifakt ( 700173 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @05:09PM (#7531882)
    Ransom Love may have told a truth or two here. Freqently people have attributed the seeming irrationality of SCO to McBride and others being on Crack. However, what better explains their actions than that this lawsuit has begun as SCO's one last chance at "payback" for old grudges? Maybe it's a classic tragedy, with McBride ending up saying "For Hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee" just before the great blue whale rolls over on him.
    • More like the classic picture of the mouse flipping off the eagle just before it's snatched up in the eagle's claws to be taken home for dinner... I personally would rather die running away as fast as I can like the wuss I truly am, but to each his own.
  • Did Mr. Love just have really cool parents, or did he change his name upon being written about in a Slashdot article?
    Furthermore, does he have a Ph.D? Because that would make him Dr. Love!
  • Does anyone else see it as ironic that the name of the man which founded the company suing our heart's labor is named Ransom Love?

  • softball interview (Score:2, Informative)

    by SQLz ( 564901 )
    not even worth the read.
  • A man who's name is "Ransom Love" is the co-founder of SCO? Perhaps they took his name on the business plan a little too literally.

  • Not Exactly the News (Score:5, Informative)

    by ThisIsFred ( 705426 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @07:09PM (#7533013) Journal
    From the article (quote by Mr. Love):

    "We were using Linux as a desktop at the same time. It was more stable than Windows NT at the time. And NT as a server was a joke.
    But NetWare was so dominant they were almost killed by their own success. NetWare was so successful that they could never move on."

    Yeah, NT was a "joke". Well, I guess that finally proves my theories about the arrogance of Novell in the face of a direct threat. I'd be wary of any business venture in which Mr. Love is involved. I'm also dubious with regard to a SuSE/Novell merger producing anything capable of competing with Windows.

    I began using GNU/Linux around 1995. It was more reliable than Windows NT at the time, but nowhere near as fast to configure. It also didn't match NT feature-for-feature in filesharing and printsharing, which was the hotly contested marketspace for low-end server installations at the time.

    Novell were content to sit on their fat behinds and make fun of NT, even as NT 4 hit the shelves, and PC sales for business went through the roof (giving Microsoft inroads through their OEM channels). Sure the first NT 4 installations crashed or exhibited strange behavior on a regular basis, but the Microsoft marketing machine was in full swing.

    My personal experience was that customers demanded Windows NT 4 because it was "new" and less costly, no matter how I tried to convince them otherwise (I would be servicing it crissakes, not them). So, rather than lose an account, I did the work. Novell didn't seem to react to the threat.

    Microsoft was competitive on pricing. The upfront costs for licenses were cheaper, MS made it easier to migrate by giving upgrade discounts and including client software to talk with Netware servers. Novell didn't lower its prices to compete, or make any gestures whatsoever to remind its existing customers that their present and future business was valuable (until much, much later, after they lost most of their customers to MS).

    Microsoft purposely had lax per-seat license checking restrictions, which people found easier to deal with. Novell still stuck with their inflexible, floppy-disk based per-seat license enforcement, which was unpopular with techs and customers alike (oops, disk went bad, guess you have an expensive doorstop instead of a new server).

    Microsoft made it easy to get documentation and programming tools for Windows. Microsoft sold those tools, other developers sold Windows programming tools, and there was healthy competition. Netware programming remained a black art, and there wasn't a whole lot of API to work with. Novell hasn't moved to correct this situation until very recently, and they still hassle you to give out information about yourself and your employer to see the documentation. I guess I'm out of the mainstream, because I think operating system developers that don't provide a full-featured compiler (even without an IDE) and reasonably detailed documentation for free are incredibly short-sighted.

    Microsoft embraced (but extended) TCP/IP as the core communication protocol in Windows, while Netware had an ugly IP duct-tape fix up until version 5. Sure Novell's implementation of IPX/SPX was more secure (and probably performed better), but IP was more flexible, and IP-enabled software was practically falling from the sky, and it was not easily ported to Netware, (as evidenced by the fact that it wasn't).

    Netware had a winning technology with NDS. I still think it's the most impressive piece of work that Novell ever released. Even with Microsoft dominating the fileserver marketspace, Novell still priced the NDS add-on for Windows more than the cost of a Windows server (with ADS) license.

    ***

    Where do Novell's profits come from these days? They must have an awful lot of funds in reserve, because they are one of the slowest-moving tech companies I've ever seen. They still can't make up their mind about what to do, and Windows has steadily become better over the past decade. I've pretty much written off Novell. Does Netware even stack up to Windows 2000/2003 now? Does it scale as well? Does it's TCP/IP stack perform as well? Is it less expensive?
    • Novell has some very large companies that use their netware. Right now I just ran a volume check on the servers where I work We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 Novell 4.11 servers and about 250 Novell 6.0 servers. We have about 80,000 folks that rely on these servers for doing business.

      Yes, we have unix and microsoft servers as well. We have a lot more unix and ms servers than novell. Not because they are better, in my opinion, but because many of our lines of business are more familiar with MS p

  • I support SCO (Score:3, Funny)

    by mnemonic_ ( 164550 ) <jamecNO@SPAMumich.edu> on Friday November 21, 2003 @08:04PM (#7533397) Homepage Journal
    Personally, I support SCO and their lawful actions. It's about time someone gave those Linux users what they deserved.
  • While you read the guy you ought to remember some facts about the Caldera vs Microsoft suit he alleges to.

    Mr. Love complains about all the wrong directions that Caldera took after he left, but the fact remains that one of main Caldera's businesses was litigation from the beginning.

    Caldera didn't write DR DOS. Caldera bought it (either DR DOR, or DR itself, I don't remember) after it was obvious to everybody that there is no future for DOS. They bought it, they pretended that they've been building some bus
  • ...that his name is really "Ransom Love". That's just nuts. Who the hell would name their kid "Ransom" anyway?

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