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Red Hat Software Businesses

SCO CEO Calls Red Hat a Fraud 207

Posted by Hemos from the no-you-have-to-pay-for-iot dept.
James Morris writes "A story at Newswire reports that SCO CEO Doug Michels considers Red Hat selling Linux to be 'a Fraud' because it was developed freely. Sounds like he forgot his medication again. " I suppose it's an interesting point-but I think the angle SCO takes is a probably a wee bit different.
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SCO CEO Calls Red Hat a Fraud More

SCO CEO Calls Red Hat a Fraud

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  • SCO don't know what they're talking about...

    Wouldn't it be sad though and ironic if GNOME/E ends up being the downfall of Red Hat? I mean look at all the resources they've invested in GNOME/E and look what they have now. Sure, they have support from the Geek world, but they always had this support.

    Caldera, on the other hand, has concentrated less resources on reinventing the wheel and now has suddenly surpassed Red Hat and maybe even Windows in one fell swoop. OpenLinux is here now, is both better and cheaper than Red Hat. (and for all that, Caldera probably paid for the Qt license)

    Interesting times indeed.

  • Red Hat employes kernel developers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Look at the number of people with redhat.com addresses on linux-kernel.

  • Hmm, maybe it's because... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SCO can no longer justify their existence. Their overpriced underfeatured OS simply cannot compete with Linux.

    Every time I've worked with SCO in the past it's made my flesh crawl. The first time was in the late 80's on a 286 running SCO Xenix. The base OS was over $1000 and if I wanted any of the other amenities that I thought should come stock with the UNIX OS (C Compiler, nroff/troff, etc) you had to add more money. MUCH more money. In addition their support line could never tell us why the OS would suddenly slow to a crawl after 2 or 3 days of running. If Linux had existed back then, my company's choice would have been a hell of a lot easier.

    In my last job I was working with SCO again and I welcomed the chance to see if they'd improved at all. Well they haven't. Their pricing plan is still one of the most confusing I've ever seen, they charge by the user if I recall correctly, and in general the OS is just plain irritating to deal with. I'm working with several different flavors of UNIX right now and SCO is the only one that feels like a toy when I use it.

    SCO should do the industry a favor and disband, pausing only to bulk-format all their drives so that none of the evil source code can inadvertently escape into the world. Their marketing people and their tech support people should be sent to camps to be retrained for professions more suited to their skills and their buildings should be torn down and burned.

    I'm betting SCO is the first casuality of the Open Source movement.

  • SCO:s problem with Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    : It seems fairly clear that they have no problem
    : with Linux as a hackers toy, but deeply resent
    : the fact that Linux is eating away the same
    : market segment they are in.

    Eating away the market segment? You mean utterly destroying the market segment for SCO.

    Everyone talks about Linux replacing or taking some of MS Windows NT market share. That will happen, but what is happening now is that Linux is destroying the market for all commercial Unixes.

    Note that Sun, Compaq (Digital), HP, IBM have all embraced Linux. They know the days of the proprietary Unixes are numbered. Since SCO doesn't sell hardware, I predict that SCO will go belly up in the year 2000.

    Now I have a soft spot in my heart for SCO, back in 1985 I learned UNIX and C on an Apple Lisa running SCO Xenix. They have been profitable in their own little niche for many years, but now that niche is gone and a $500+ ??? is not going to be able to compete with "free." Either SCO has to come up with a radically different business model or they will disappear. And when that happens it will be sad.

    I wish I was shelling C-Shells by the sea shore, that would be the life.

  • Quoting him from the article:

    Where I get in trouble with Linux is when you take it out of the cult . . . and say "now I'm Red Hat and I'm going to make a million dollars out of selling this software people developed for free."

    Yep, that is indeed where he gets in trouble, isn't it? In an oh-lordy-I'm-doomed sort of way...

  • The GNU License says that you cannot sell the software for an unreasonable amount of money.

    I must have missed that part of the GPL. Could you point it out for me?

    ---

  • The GNU License says that you cannot sell the software for an unreasonable amount of money.

    Me: I must have missed that part of the GPL. Could you point it out for me?

    I was being sarcastic. I already knew there is no such part; I was challenging the original poster's false statement.

    Obviously, my intent wasn't clear. But thanks to the people who pointed it out, anyway.

    ---

  • When you buy Red Hat, you're not paying for linux. The software doesn't cost anything--it's right there on the FTP server for all to have. You're paying for the installation manual, customer support, etc. He knows this, however. He's in a tough position: SCO's sales have increased dramatically recently, and that's due in a large part to the positive press and attention linux has been getting lately. If linux gets Unix good press, of course he's not going to complain about linux itself--hence his coments on the subject. But he knows it's not going to last for him. Let's face it, SCO sucks compared to linux, and if linux is successful in the business world, it's going to kick SCO's ass all over the place. And the biggest danger to him is of course Red Hat. His attitude makes perfect sense.
  • I personally have bought 2 official versions of RedHat, 2 SuSE and 1 Debian so far this year. I also got older Redhat, Slackware and Caldera CDs that came last years with book purchases. It's worth the convenience to pay for distros on CD
  • If it wasn't for SCO sucking so bad, Linus probably would have never bothered.

    Seriously, who does this guy think he's fooling? At this point, by criticizing RedHat all he does is drive his own disatisfied customers RedHat's way.

    We re-evaluated UnixWare as an Oracle server a couple of years ago and were so impressed with the performance that we came close to buying the UnixWare license, but then running Oracle in Linux using iBCS. (Basically, we just wanted the shared libraries and the commercial support that came with an official Oracle platform.) Fortunately, the database vendors have come to their senses and are now all supporting Linux.

    RedHat is a great company because they actually add value to an already great Linux. I am still convinced that SCO is the core of a Microsoft conspiracy to make UNIX a bad word.
  • There are a lot bigger fish to go after in terms of lawsuits. Why should Bob Young waste time, money, and anguish over something said by the CEO of a dying company that his company is in the process of driving out of business the old-fashioned way, by having a better product for a better price?
    Bob's revenge is going to be when SCO declares Chapter 7. Beside that, a lawsuit would blatant overkill.

  • SCO's sales have not "really" increased dramatically recently. What you are seeing is the final retirement of many older SCO Unix systems, which are having to be upgraded to SCO OpenServer or UnixWare because they were not Y2K compliant. A lot of people, unlike my former employer, left that Y2K upgrade until the last minute, leaving them no time to change to Linux or some other platform before the stroke of doom hits. Thus SCO is smiling all the way to the bank.

    In addition, SCO has some additional revenue due to their 64-bit port that is being done to Merced under contract to Intel (and somebody else, but I don't remember who, was it HP?). But this does not really count as sales, even though it is a big boost to their bottom line.

    I have a hunch that if you take out the Y2K stuff, SCO's sales are actually stagnant. SCO's problem is that their entire VAR network was set up around SCO Unix feeding a multi-port serial card feeding dumb terminals, and that paradigm isn't going to take them far into the next century. If they had expressed an interest in Internet serving earlier, they could have jumped onto that bandwagon, but they let Linux and the BSD's (including BSDI) and Sun go after that market for some reason. Reading SCO World back in the mid 90's, you would have thought that the Internet did not exist.
    About the only thing they do have going for them is big name databases running on SCO Unix already, stable and proven. That will take them a little bit further and is, in fact, the primary reason SCO Unix is still alive -- until recently, your choices in the big name database market for a reasonable price were NT, SCO Unix, and RISC Unix, and if you wanted x86 platform on a non-MS OS, SCO Unix was it. But as database vendor support for Linux solidifies that's going to become less and less a factor.
    I would not invest in SCO right now (grin).

  • Memoirs of ANOTHER former SCO developer (Score:5)

    by Eric Green ( 627 ) on Wednesday April 21, 1999 @09:21AM (#1923645) Homepage
    My employer at the time made the transition in spring of 1996. SCO had discontinued Xenix by then, and our customers were VERY unhappy about the thought of paying massive per-user fees when we upgraded their old Xenix servers (Xenix was unlimited user). I tried running our database engine under iBCS2 on Linux and guess what? It actually ran FASTER than on SCO Unix!

    When the bid season started, my boss looked at the per-user charges for Linux, looked at the per-user charges for SCO Unix, asked me what the downside was, and all I could do was shrug and say "I don't know, I've been doing my development under Linux for the last three months and then porting it to SCO, everything seems to work right and work faster."

    One trial school district later, and it was official: Linux was more stable and more feature-ful than SCO Unix, and ran like a scalded cat even on lowly IDE drives (SCO Unix runs like a bored tortoise on IDE). Porting our SCO Unix application to Linux was basically a case of re-compiling and fixing some minor printer issues in our code (since Linux uses the BSD print spooler while SCO uses the Sys V print spooler).

    Y2K hurried the move to Linux too, since all the older SCO boxes had Y2K issues.

    I know for a fact that SCO lost over $250,000 in sales from that single move to Linux. Multiply that by every other SCO VAR that is looking at Linux or has switched to Linux, and you can only conclude that SCO would have at least twice the revenue that they have today, if not for Linux.

    -- Eric

  • They would be able to distribute LINUX and SCO-UNIX to their customers. They may take a short-term hit on profits but would have long-term gains. Their business is going bye-bye gradually anyway. Why should they just fade away when they can apply their resources to Linux and have a crack distribution going in no time?

    I really don't understand why they choose to lose.
  • Posted by Just Another Perl Slacker:

    I posted the following comment to SCO using their website feedback form at http://www.sco.com/feedback/index.html.

    Regarding your CEO's comments about Red Hat, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Red Hat has devoted many hours to developing the Redhat Package Manager (RPM) which most of the other Linux Distributions use, free of charge. Red Hat also devoted many hours to developing Gnome, what is quickly becoming the nicest looking and easiest to use Desktop for Linux. In addition, as with most Linux distro's, anybody can download Red Hat Linux for free from many different FTP mirror sites. Anybody who pays Red Hat for a cd of Linux (which I intend to do with Red Hat 6.0) is choosing to support this company for all the great work they've done in helping to make Linux as good and as accessible as it is. This is a loyalty base any company would love to have, including yours. You could learn something from Red Hat instead of slamming them in the news.
  • Of course, SCO could always get rid of the standard unix utilities that they maintain and have used for the last decade and just use gnu utilities, gnu compilers, etc. Since they own unix they could just charge $50 for the kernel and charge extra for support and optional features.

    Then RMS could get on their back for being a GNU system built on top of a SCO kernel :)

    -Peter
  • The interesting thing was seeing sco's income and profit amounts. Those numbers don't seem large
    enough to support all the technology they've been promising (like next generation unix) or to
    compete with MS or any of the RISC unix vendors. This puts them in the same league as the remains
    of Borland.

    I wonder how those numbers compare to RedHat? We'll have to have an announcement if (when?)
    RedHat overtakes them :)
  • Sure, and before that Project Gemini with HP to do exactly the same thing. I know they have the money
    for a marketing department, it's their technical abilities I doubt.

    Geeze, even the merger of their two products was supposed to be complete and re-released long ago.
  • It was sold to X/Open (the Open Group) back in like 1992 or 1993 by USL, long before SCO owned them.
  • Number one, I've been using Redhat (and Debian) for three years. I have always bought the RH distribution from RH for one reason: money talks, and bullshit walks. These folks are doing a Good Thing, therefore they get my money. It's that simple, and it's not going to change. Perhaps I'm more generous than some, but surely not moreso than all?

    Furthermore when I get a distribution to install on one of my customers' servers, I always get RH. They get the book, they get the sticker, and they get something they recognize.
  • Most of what COL has over RH or Suse now is primarily a matter of the bundling of a commercial re-partitioner.

    It's interesting that Red Hat, Caldera, and SuSE are pretty much in sync for the first time -- they all use the 2.2 kernel, glibc 2.1, KDE 1.1, etc. About the only thing that sets them apart are Red Hat's dominant market position, Caldera's Linux Wizard, and SuSE's extensive software bundle.

    Caldera has had quite awhile to bridge this gap and it doesn't even appear to have leapfrogged that much.

    Yet it might be enough to help them expand their market share several times over.

    TedC

  • Anyone know if SCO Merge runs under ibcs2?

    It'd be interesting to compare it to VMWare...
  • Who had been selling an inferior Unix for way too much money? I think SCO should have a class action lawsuit filed against it. Granted, anyone allowing people to buy Unix is a Good Thing (TM), but I believe SCO shouldn't take pot shots at people making a buck.
  • The GPL says no such thing. However, seeing as the software is freely downloadable, it would be difficult to convince someone to pay beaucoup bux.
    --
    Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
  • Last year, I had a job as a UNIXWARE Administrator (2.1.2 or something). Out of the BOX, UNIXWARE had issues. Standard install doesn't include MAN pages, it doesn't work well with the IBM server we bought with it preinstalled, and the print drivers that were included didn't even work correctly with the printers they were supposed to work with (luckily that last was a HUGE shell script, and I just went into my vi editor and commented out a couple lines, and added the fixed lines after it).

    Remember SCO's into the FUD arena too as it is an offshoot from M$. I'm not sure if its still true, but at one time M$ owned SCO (M$ gave SCO XENIX in return SCO gave M$ SCO), giving them aproximately 80% of the UNIX market as well as the DOS/Windows market (essentially a strangle hold on the operating systems, they were still partners with IBM on OS/2). SCO has had the INTEL/UNIX world totally wrapped up until recently when LINUX entered the arena. For a tidy license fee (similar to NT's) you too can have a nice little SCO Unixware box sitting at your desktop to do your bidding. Just don't try to use anything that's not approved SCO "Skunkware" or expect the entire system to go to hell in a handbasket.

    Bottom line is that SCO fears LINUX for being able to take away its marketshare.

  • First off, everything I've stated in my argument is not FUD. My point about the MAN pages is that, by default they're not installed, and the physical manuals by SCO have to be ordered from a 3rd party vendor for extra cost.

    IBM makes great mid-sized servers. This could start a major flame war regarding which x86 servers the best so I'll leave it at this: that server (of which our company had quite a few of) were stable as any other server in both the NT and Novell 4.11 environment as servers, so I'd expect them to be STABLE in a UNIX environment since the OS generally is more stable (at least more stable than NT).

    I too expect that SCO will be out and about for years to come, but fact remains that from the early to mid 90's, SCO had a large margin of the x86 UNIX market (80+% I believe) compared to other UNICIES at the time. Linux as well as the BSD's are the first comparable operating systems as far as acceptance and power.

    If you feel you must flame me, please feel free to e-mail me directly at my address by changing the at and dot's to @ and . respectively.

  • Don't burn it!!! Try putting it in the microwave for about 5 seconds or so, label side down. It is quite a bit of fun!!

  • He seems to be missing the point. (Score:3)

    by Jaer ( 1627 ) on Wednesday April 21, 1999 @05:44AM (#1923662) Homepage
    RedHat is not selling Linux or GNU tools it is convenient to think so but in reality it is plainly not true.

    I do not buy RedHat CD's because they have the latest greatest Linux or Tools on them but because they are easy to install and maintain.

    RedHat sells the work they but into putting all these utilities together in a convienient and usable format. I would gladly pay the the $50 for that. It's a lot of work and I think they are doing a great job and obviously 400 000 other people think the same thing.

    Also I am willing to buy my RedHat CD because I know that that money does not just go into pockets but are actually used to advance the cause of Linux and to help fund other projects that make Linux a better project.

    The GNU License says that you cannot sell the software for an unreasonable amount of money. RedHat is not doing that. I do think that SCO is selling their product for an unreasonable amount of money and that is why I'm not using it.

    I believe that the Linux community is not anti capitalism or even believe you should not be paid for work you do we just believe that you should not get paid an excuberant amount of money for inverior work.

    I also believe that someone outside the Linux community have no say in what RedHat does with Linux or the GNU tools that come with it. But I do believe that they are towing a very thin line and that the Linux community will keep them there.

  • SCO use to be the "UNIX" that people choose if they wanted to run it on x86 hardware (and if I'm not mistaken, don't they own the word "UNIX" now?). Now Red Hat is the #1 choise. Hmm....

    There is a big price gap, and, (this is second hand information) I hear there is a big preformance gap also, with Red Hat being Cheaper, and Better Preforming.

    Somehow, I think if Debian, with it's totally diffrent distribution style and model and charter was in Red Hat's Market Share, and Red Hat was the smaller one, I think Michel's might have attacked them. Loosing your #1 spot hurts, and you gotta blame someone.

    "'now I'm Red Hat and I'm going to make a million dollars out of selling this software people developed for free'," he said at a media briefing in Sydney this morning. "I think it's a fraud." Well, if that's the worst he has to say, not much damage done, I'll still send $50 to Red Hat so they can make a million dollars and keep hiring those people who "write the software for free."

  • http://www.afr.com.au/content/990420/inform/inform 4.html

    Now who is stealing what?

  • I went to a SCO booth during a career fair in '97 at my college. I expressed my interest in learning about the company and what it might have to offer an experienced Linux User and Computer Systems Engineering Degree holder. She said, and I quote "We don't want students using Linux," and hands me a SCO CD. I never did install it, and after this "Fraud" crap, I think I'll use it as a coaster-- or burn it. Or maybe I'll send it back with a copy of this post.
  • SCO just doesn't get it.

    It appears that Red Hat is doing quite well, thank you, with their business model.

  • I think he's just bitter because using Linux (even Red Hat :^) compared to SCO is like having oral sex versus a getting a sharp stick in the eye. And if the sex can be had for free and the stick costs $300 per eye, well, it probably just makes him madder.

    See, he ignores that Red Hat also makes its distros available for free, as long as you provide your end of the media (bandwidth).

    Bander

  • ...thank goodness for a little choice. Sure beats having to resort to windows. It's all good.

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • I actually didn't miss that point, I know that people are developing out of an enjoyment of the act of developing. The point I'm trying to make is that it is possible for RedHat to make an honest living out of distributing the software and providing support. For the average person who has contributed something to the kernel or a command line utility this isn't the case without resorting to some convoluted logic (it made me a better and more renowned coder, therefore I got a good job). It's a bit like saying that depending on your field going to university is making money. No, going to university in my case enabled me to make fist-fulls of cash. On a similar token I'm probably going to start a free software project in the near future (this weekend if payed work doesn't get in the way), but since I purposely avoided writing software for a living by wiring together transistors it really won't make one iotas difference to my career unless I change careers. Monetary gain isn't why I'm doing what I'm going to do and I don't expect any. For some people however even a small stipend which either helps pay the rent or lets them upgrade there old reliable 80386 to a dizzyingly fast 133 MHz pentium can make a difference in their ability to contribute.

  • If you can't beat them, whine (Score:3)

    by substrate ( 2628 ) on Wednesday April 21, 1999 @05:58AM (#1923670)
    SCO UNIX lost and so rather than admitting defeat or, God forbid, improving their product the CEO whines about Red Hat. The FSF license terms have always made it possible for a third party to sell distributions or support. It bothers me a bit that a lot of people who have contributed code to the Linux kernel, or to the nuts and bolts that makes a Linux operating system work (silly little things like command line utilities, compilers, windowing systems) don't get beans. It's almost like the distribution and support is valued over writing code.

    SCO positioned itself to be a niche player though, they aimed at small businesses that may need a UNIX. Linux pretty solidly took away that niche by being free, but also by being a better product. Red Hat still makes their product, with source code no less, available free for the download. They have to, and this is also how they generated enough good will and recognition for their product. My first linux install was some version 1, slackware and was downloaded entirely via a flaky 2400 baud modem. Painful barely begins to describe the experience. Later on I upgraded to a Red Hat distribution and was very impressed with the install technology. It made the Windows install look like it was the product of not infinite monkeys banging away at a keyboard, but about 12. I still did it over a modem, this time a zippy 14.4K and it was still painful, but from that point on I was willing to pay a nominal fee for a distribution.

    As an aside does anybody have numbers for Red Hat installations broken up by free distributions and commercial distributions?
  • What are the chances that there is no BSD-derived code left in SCO Unix? Very very small I'd guess. Of the two companies, SCO is probably the greater of the two evils, while Redhat may be profiteering they still give back to the Linux community (and Unix community as well) and everything is still obviously open source. SCO on the other hand is profiteering off a lot of work done by students at UCB and the list of things the Unix community owes them is probably rather short.
    He's just trying to spread malcontent...he knows SCO has been rendered obsolete by Linux and is scared that his company may have a short life ahead of it.
  • red hat is not my favorite distribution but it is a decent distribution and they do add value to linux and that is what they charge for. plus the distribution is available for free on their ftp site.

    this is completely laughable since this is same sco that charges $1500 for a 5 USER LICENSE of sco with NO SOURCE, NO COMPILER, NO GNU TOOLS, and NO SUPPORT. linux is free with source, unlimited, has gnu tools, and free support is available through the various net resources.

    who's the fraud?



    "The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."

  • In the interest of eliminating confusion,rh6 will have GNOME and KDE. Not E. And they're optional. At least they were in the 5.9 install.

    Log

  • They sure know there *** from a **** in the ground. It's called being a VAR guys. There's nothing wrong with extending the VAR model to GPL land. As RedHat and many other distros have proven, it works very well actually. This comment is totally biased anyway... who's SCO's biggest threat right now? Of course they would like it to be required that anyone wishing to run Linux have to download 300MB over the net and install it all manually :). I'm seeing SCO boxes replaced all of the time by Linux boxes running IBCS. Very nice.
  • what the point to running SCO is?

    When is it a better choice than Linux, BSD, or Solaris?

    How on earth do these guys still make money?
  • The company I work for is a cross platform shop - many years ago there was a push to port everything to sco and so we did. We never sold a single product so we dropped sco support years ago. Within the last year we have been actively pushed by real clients willing to buy immediately to port our software to linux. SCO is done - make no mistake about it, for a long time their claim to fame was "We have unix that runs on your pc" - but they are now one of a number of unices that run on a pc and theirs is the only one that is costly. SCO is in a sense like the former soviet union - they are the only country that doesn't seem to be willing to accept that they are no longer a super power but not accepting a thing does not cause that thing to be untrue.
  • The real fraud is selling an OS with no decent support outside the US. I have been using SCO for nearly 10 years in my job. Support from SCO subsidiaries/affiliates/resellers in continental Europe is certainly not worth the price we pay for .
  • Such wanking by SCO's CEO suggests to me that he's seeing something extremely unpleasant in the company's bottom-line forecasts, something we don't see but can probably guess. My guess is that Linux and *BSD between them are projected to eat SCO alive.

    This puerile public performance can only hasten SCO's demise. Maybe when they go Chapter 7 whoever picks up the codebase and legal trademark known as "UNIX" out of the rubble will GPL the whole thing so they can fix what's wrong using GNU tooling and Linux code, and allow free migration into Linux of whatever nuggets of functionality Linux hasn't already surpassed.

  • that is so much bullshit, but it's 2.1. in any case no unix svr4 i came across lacked man pages. perhaps you forgot to install them...

    i just installed the for-free distribution of uw 7.0. more manual pages that you can shake a stick at. it took 15 minutes for the html files to install... ie untarring.

    HTML files are not man pages. Man pages are what you get when you type man ls and suchlike. And, yes, the original poster is right: they're not installed by default. Even worse, when you do install them, they're preformatted man pages, because nroff and troff are extra-cost add-ons! That's okay until you try to install a third-party package that has nroff-style man pages and you can't read them.

    Then try adding GNU groff to cover that lack. First you have to install GNU C++ and GNU make to compile it because SCO CC and SCO make are so weak. Have you ever tried to compile gcc on UnixWare? It is not pretty.

    unixware is known to scale (svr unix has been ported onto S370 class systems by both ibm and amdahl)

    This is the standard comeback from UnixWare users, and it gets a little tiring. Anyone with sense can see that Linux can scale at least as far as UnixWare, but just because no one has tried it, the UW people laugh derisively and say it can't be done. The truth is, porting PC Unix-like systems to mainframes is just a PR stunt, not a practical solution to a real problem. If you have a mainframe-class problem, you use a mainframe OS, it's that simple.

    I use UnixWare and Linux every day, and I can tell you that it's not about price, it's about power, support and convenience. Linux has it, and UnixWare doesn't. It's that simple.

  • Memoirs of a SCO _Integrator_ (Score:3)

    by Monkius ( 3888 ) on Wednesday April 21, 1999 @09:23AM (#1923680) Homepage
    The big problem for SCO here is that even if SCO UnixWare were a good product, it could never deliver the value of Open Source Linux.

    Unfortunately, SCO UnixWare is NOT a good product. I should know--I've worked with two revisions of SCO UnixWare, and Univell UnixWare itself since version 1.

    Between 1994 and 1996, I worked for a systems integrator--mostly programming for Linux--and during that time, found myself working on two SCO UnixWare deals. Both were implementation and support nightmares--thanks to both the poor quality of the SCO product, and the equally poor quality of its (very expensive) product support.

    1. An accouting firm in Detroit was migrating to UnixWare from pure AT&T 386 SysV (Oracle). Due to undocumented bugs in the SCO PCI implementation, UnixWare 2.11 wouldn't even INSTALL on 5 out of 6 PCI motherboards we tried. Meanwhile, the SCO hardware compatibility list was nearly two years out of date, and SCO reps refused to endorse any vendor's motherboards for use with the product. Once installed, we spent three weeks debugging problems with UnixWare's buggy ethernet drivers--which a reliable source told us were in some obscene manner derived from Netware DOS binaries.

    2. Later, someone in our office sold UnixWare as a Novell MHS mail gateway. Too bad the PERL scripts AND the Novell integration were so buggy that a SCO tech support person (whom we paid much money) confided the product was basically unsuable. We had to rewrite portions of the mail gateway ourselves, and never solved intermittent connection problems between UnixWare and Novell.

    I do not feel sorry for this company.

  • just a quickie: isn't there a SCO emulator for Linux?

  • I'm not surprised, really - the companies that produce boxes as well as Unixes have been embracing Linux (Sun, SGI, HP, IBM), since it gives them an attractive option and lets them keep selling their boxes. SCO, on the other hand, quoting Spike Lee in those asinine Pizza Hut ads: "You got nothin'!" Even though they bought the old AT&T code, it hasn't done them a whit of good. And SCO is far too wed to the old pricing and development modes to really compete against Linux and Windows at the low end, and minis/other commercial Unixes at the high end.

    Personally, I'd sell their stock short.

  • RedHat may sell their distribution, but it's still downloadable for free.

    And of course, at this stage of the game, they can't make enough money from support alone to justify distributing Linux at replication cost only.

    Anyway, not that selling Linux at any price is against the GNU philosophy - as long as the source code is there, and the option exists to get it for free.

    So SCO's whining sounds like sour-grapes from a company who are losing market share hand over fist. SCO Unix / Xenix was always a dog anyway.


    Chris Wareham
  • "It felt like a car at the demolition derby: somehow it kept going while bits and pieces seemed to be falling off left and right"

    Hee, hee! Probably the best description of SCO I've seen.

    SCO is my 2nd (or third) least favorite operating system. But you do have to grant them one thing. It DOES keep going (Unlike a certain companies product that starts with an W).

    I had the *ahem* pleasure of working on a SCO system that did not have an administrator for 2 years! No one had the root password, and the last person who did left 2 years prior. The dang think just kept running, and never managed to run out of hard drive space.

    Sucky design, but it ran....

  • No. The kernel and most of the system is pure System V, with Xenix extensions. Shudder...

  • Survived a SCO Y2K VAR meeting in Minneapolis (Score:3)

    by CarlPatten ( 6233 ) on Wednesday April 21, 1999 @12:45PM (#1923690)
    Thank you for mentioning SCO VARs. I hope they all switch to Linux. Here's why:

    Last month when I attended SCO's quarterly VAR briefing in Minneapolis as an end-user guest of our reseller, I was astounded by how little regard SCO had for these people who presumably are making them money. We sat through a long, inaccurate PowerPoint presentation on the Y2K problem, presented by "someone from corporate" who had no idea what he was talking about. Then they explained how SCO was going to charge several thousand dollars to evaluate legacy SCO UNIX systems for Y2K compliance, effectively cutting out the VARs from this source of income. You could hear the grumblings getting louder as his talk went on. The presenters were aware of this; midway through, they switched from talking about SCO as "we" to SCO as "them."

    My reseller and I walked out before the end. It was a waste of time. There was no talk of new products, not even their "Tarantella" product which appears to do most of what Citrix MetaFrame does. There was no talk about what SCO was doing to compete against Linux or NT. There was nothing to give me confidence that SCO will exist as a company after the year 2000.

    With Linux, VARs can be as independent as they choose. They can be their own developers, or they can resell Red Hat, Caldera, etc. They don't have to worry about being the only "SCO-authorized" training center in a 300-mile radius or whatever the limit is.

    Thanks, SCO, for spreading FUD about Y2K and FUD about Linux. You've ruined the attitude of this once very happy customer.

    Very sincerely,

    Carl Patten
    Systems Administrator
    Trimodal Inc.
    (cpatte@trimodalinc.com)
  • I think it is fairly clear what their problem is. Linux is being developed openly, at no cost to resellers, apart from what they decide to contribute themselves. SCO, on the other hand, needs a large -- and expensive -- staff to produce their OS. This means that Red Hat, Caldera et. al. can resell the system at a price point that would be suicidal for SCO. It seems fairly clear that they have no problem with Linux as a hackers toy, but deeply resent the fact that Linux is eating away the same market segment they are in.

    I would'nt be too suprised if SCO tried attacking the Linux distributors legally, claiming that they have unfair advantage in the marketplace. Don't think they could win such a suit, but it would probably slow the adoption of Linux during the legal proceedings.
  • As one of the Unices I had never tried, I had this nagging idea that someday I might need to try out SCO. However, I'm glad that their CEO just made my life easier by showing me that I have absolutely no interest in their product.
  • ...on SCO's part.

    A company chief exec has come out and
    openly accused another company of fraud.
    I hope RedHat pursues this.

    Before you accuse somebody of fraud (a civil
    crime in California and probably everywhere else
    in the USA), you'd better have some pretty good
    evidence, or have an attorney general with some
    good evidence, and be ready to defend your
    allegations of fraud in a courtroom.

    If RedHat played their litigation card just right,
    this one word could actually end up costing SCO
    the farm.

    I do know for certain, that if such an individual
    made a groundless accusation of my company committing fraud, I would file a complaint consisting of an initial petition to cease and
    desist, a restraining order to stop the individual
    from making public statements about my company and I would publicly demand a retraction from any news
    media that carried this story in a sympathetic vein. That's where I'd start. Then I would start
    tallying the potential damages from such reckless,
    willful defamation.

    Yes, this could cost them.
  • Just like standing up for your trademarks
    is important, standing up against slander
    is important too. They have an obligation
    to fight this ignorance.

    I want an apology from SCO on RedHat's behalf.

  • They are selling a Linux distribution. Creating a Linux distribution is a lot of work, and surely they are charging a fair price for what they do. It's not like they are selling sand at the beach.



    I can't believe I'm defending RH here! :)

  • If you need an app that runs on SCO but not Linux/BSD, or you need a real System V Unix system. Of course Solaris x86 fits that bill, but I think SCO has more marketshare than Solaris on Intel.
  • I worked in a shop where had both SCO Unix and Linux (1.2 at the time). Linux almost always ran circles around SCO. More throughput? I laugh. We had a UUCP link between a SCO Unix machine, on a P90 and Linux on a 486/66. (This was several years ago when such hardware was common). We couldn't have more than 38400 bps on the UUCP link because the SCO kernel would puke. Linux on the slower hardware had no such problem. There were other similar incidents, we had SCO boxes crash when you tried to change virtual consoles!!

    Of course this was SCO Unix, not Unixware. I can't speak for SCO Unixware, but it has got to be better than SCO Unix.
  • The difference between SCO and the other Unix vendors is that the other guys also sell hardware, SCO doesn't. The other guys will be happy to sell Linux running on *their* hardware. Sun does seem worried about Linux too, though.
  • At the 1996 Unix Expo, SCO had a booth giving away free CD-Roms of SCO Unix. I already had SCO experience, and although I preferred Linux even then, I thought It might be cool to have a SCO partition.

    So I inserted the Boot disk, SCO was like, "Um, you have IDE hardware? What's that?". Well supposed SCO had patches on their website for IDE equiptment, but I decided that it probably wasn't going to be worth the trouble, so I never installed it!
  • I worked in a SCO shop from 1995-1997. We had a few Linux boxes, and even then, Linux was running circles around SCO Unix. Despite this, there were a number of very Pro-SCO people who thought this Linux thing was just a toy, and didn't belong in the corporate environment because it's not commercial.
  • More like they are selling prebuilt sandcastles at the beach, not just scooping up sand an packaging it.
  • I don't think SCO comes with any GNU tools, but you can get them as add-ons.
  • No, GNU tools are better implementations than the Unix (SCO == Unix) equivalants. SCO is not trying to clone what the GNU project has done, it's the other way around.
  • That would be true if it was the SCO "OpenServer" product. However, the product that they were giving away is SCO "Open Desktop" (ODT). How many desktop systems have SCSI? A small proportion of them.

    My point was that SCO's hardware support is lousy.
  • If they built SCO & Xenix compatibility into it, maybe building on what iBCS already offers, and adding the libs needed to make it work, and made a more SysV-type setup, there would be a market for it. But they wouldn't be able to get away with the license fees that they charge.
  • I lost interest in mine when I found out during the install, that I'd have to go download patches from SCO to be able to use my IDE devices.
  • My understanding is that MS contracted SCO to write Xenix, which was originall sold as an MS product.

    I don't think MS or Bill every exclusivly owned SCO, but MS was (is?) heavily invested in them.
  • SCSI's great for a multiuser system, but its need is questionable for a personal Linux system, that never sees more than one user at a time.

    Sure I'd like to have it, but I'm not bottlenecked by disk performance now, so I can't justify paying hundreds of dollars to switch.
  • SCSI's great for a multiuser system, but its need is questionable for a personal Linux system, that never sees more than one user at a time.



    Sure I'd like to have it, but I'm not bottlenecked by disk performance now, so I can't justify paying hundreds of dollars to switch.
  • Like I said, this was 1996. I've never used Unixware, so I can't speak for it.

    As for SCO hardware support. We always had to carefully spec out our systems in accordance to what SCO supported, and even in 1995/1996, Linux supported a wider range of hardware than SCO did.

    I know it's tough in th x86 market, with the wide variety of hardware available.
  • But the deal is: every machine I put SCO on I have to cough up a license fee; a big cost of s/w is the config and support, to make it useful to a business or individual - NOT a fee just to install and hang an O'Ficcial license on the wall next to the box to admire.

    Chuck
  • > It's not like they are selling sand at the beach

    It's exactly like they're selling sand at the beach. They just strain out all the rocks and seaweed and stuff, put it into nice little baggies with a professional looking logo, and tape them shut so you don't have to get any on you before you get it home.

  • substrate wrote:
    It bothers me a bit that a lot of people who have contributed code to the Linux kernel, or to the nuts and bolts that makes a Linux operating system work (silly little things like command line utilities, compilers, windowing systems) don't get beans. It's almost like the distribution and support is valued over writing code.
    While I understand the sentiment, you're missing a point and it's a very important point. RH makes money from Linux because they try to. Those people contributing all that work "for free" may or may not be trying to make money. But that better not be their primary motivation, because if they don't enjoy what they do for its own sake, the quality is going to go down.

    And a lot of them are making money. They put their not-insignificant free software work on their resumes, and they use it to get hired into full-time jobs that pay the rent. Some of them are even working for people like Red Hat, SuSE and Cygnus. So believe me, their work is appreciated, and the only reason they aren't paid directly for it is that they are doing their job, which is to work on stuff they enjoy working on.... ;)

  • 1) Support. Many people like support, and they'll pay for it. I suspect the 50 dollars you pay for a official Red Hat package are money well spent if you use the 90 day technical support...

    2) The name. In the business market, I imagine it will be a hell of a lot easier to make the boss buy "Official Red Hat Linux" than a noname Red Hat Linux clone.
  • I bought my copy of Red Hat 5.2 for $1.29 plus shipping (another $2). SCO will sell me a non-commercial disk for $20 plus shipping. They claim it's to cover the cost of the disk. That's fraud. I refuse to believe that copying CDs costs SCO 17x what it costs infomagic.

  • I bought my copy of Red Hat 5.2 for $1.29 plus shipping (another $2). SCO will sell me a non-commercial disk for $20 plus shipping. They claim it's to cover the cost of the disk. That's fraud. I refuse to believe that copying CDs costs SCO 17x what it costs infomagic.



  • it's not just nice that RH has their dist up for free, it's required :)
    GPL and all that, ya know

    Actually the GPL doesn't mention putting binary RPMs and installation tools on the Internet for free download. Caldera's distribution contains lots of GPLed software but you can't download it for free.

    You can't even download all of Official Red Hat for free -- or you couldn't at 5.1 when I got BRU and MetroX on the CD. Maybe those proprietary programs are no longer part of the Official package.

    Jonathan
  • of course the CEO of SCO is pissed. They spent a lot time and money developing thier version of UNIX (and removing MS code from the kernel) only to have Linux develop into a better product, all for free. To add insult to injury, RedHat leverages all this free labor and becomes a major player in the Linux/UNIX/thin-server/server market (or whatever you wish to call it). I live and work in the Santa Cruz area. I once concidered working for SCO but I realized (even 2 years ago) that SCO would be the biggest loser in the Linux/OSS revolution (if not to Linux, then to FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc). If SCO were smart about it, they would add a Linux division to their company, port thier tools (and maybe make a mid to high range server distro) and make a bunch of money off of consulting and custom development. They definatly have the UNIX expertise and the name to give them credibility.



  • At one time SCO was an offshoot from MS but for some reason or another (think it had to do with a deal MS made with ???? to not get into the UNIX market - I may be wrong about this) it no longer is. In fact, SCO just won a lengthy court battle with MS that will alow them to remove all MS code from their kernel. so really, SCO has severed all ties with MS.

  • When SCO finally goes under what will happen to its assets? The codebase might be useful for historical reasons, but the Unix trademark might be worth a bit of money. Perhaps Red Hat or Caldera might buy the assets and put the code under GPL? Wouldn't that be fun.


  • Both are protected by copyrights and patents. RedHat is not. What I'm telling you is that there are really no barriers to entry. IBM could come in right now, copy everything that is good with RedHat, byte for byte, maybe even add a few packages. Whom do you think has more clout in terms of brand equity? While some may argue that Coca-Cola and the rest taste differently, the same argument can not be made for a byte for byte copy of software.

    RedHat is still a very tiny company which has yet to prove itself to the powers that be. Even if we could warp forward in time, in a universe where RedHat's distribution is king, they _might_ be able to retain it with brand equity. But RedHat simply is not at this point yet. Linux is still very immature from a commercial viewpoint. RedHat may be on top of the heap today, but its commercial validity as a serious contender against real competition of the future I question.

    Have you ever wondered why RedHat is reluctant to join the Linux Standard Board? I think this is atleast partially about RedHat trying to differentiate themselves. Their argument that the LSB is too slow might be partially valid. However, I think their real motivation is that they want to differentiate themselves. Assuming that RedHat becomes the unofficial standard, and that the other vendors are too proud to clone RedHat lay out, this would give them a leg up. Both in the distribution and the support business.

  • I too use and buy RedHat's 'official' releases. I also think RedHat has made many vital contributions to Linux. But if you look at each one of these, these are not major efforts, they are significant because Linux is/was so small and they're badly needed. They've just addressed what no one else had, ease of use issues and what not. The question is: Can RedHat, and operations like it, get a return on their future efforts. I really don't think they can. If they were to go out today, and spend 50 million dollars (which is never going to happen) on Gnome -- and make it every bit as good as Windows95 from the beginners perspective -- how would this be a wise business decision? Even IF the software market jumps at this enough to cause 2billion dollars worth of Linux sales -- who says its going to be RedHat with the lions share? Thus far all of RedHat's competition has tried to make it on there own, but there is nothing stopping them from literally duplicating Linux's distributions and offering it for 3 dollars.


  • This article was far too short and didn't say much. He never really explained what he meant by 'fraud'. However, I'm assuming that he was attacking RedHat's business model. If this is the case, I think he does have a point. In other words, this is not a company you would want to invest in. Redhat doesn't have any propietary software. 99% of their package is developed by the general open source community, the other 1% by their in house staff. They have no propietary software, I'm not even sure if they have exclusive rights to their own documentation. It can all be downloaded with source for free! Right now their cash cow is the convience factor. They make money by packaging Linux up on a CD in a nice convenient easily installable package with documentation. The problem with this is that when and if Linux takes off, what stops competition from coming in and copying their packages exactly and selling them for 2 dollars? The fact of the matter is that even right now most slashdotters only buy the 2 dollar cheapbytes' versions of RedHat. People new to Linux and RedHat actually buy the 50 dollar CD from RedHat. But eventually this market is going to slip away when the market begins to mature someone going to figure out just how easy it is to pirate RedHat's cash cow. Ok, now from the Linux communities perspective. What can RedHat add, never mind their profit margins. The amount of money that they can sink into Open Source projects like Gnome is extremely limited. They simply can't afford it. The only way they can get a return on their money, is in minor trimmings that get added to their own distribution. When other companies start mirroring these additions you'll see these projects get strangled.

    Certainly some of you will clammor that 'RMS says that he doens't mind them making money on support'. This may be true. Theoretically, RedHat could make money by offering support. I've yet to see any proof that this business model even works. Certainly RedHat hasn't shown it. I doubt that their support operations are even breaking even right now. The support operations are even questionable in the long run. What makes RedHat the ideal source to answer questions about Linux? If MS were to suddenly die tommarow and Linux declared THE new OS of the masses, who do you think is in the best position to offer support for Linux? Since there is nothing propietary, nothing secret, in Redhat Linux distribution what makes RedHat any better at support than anyone else? IBM and many other companies are in great positions to jump on markets like these. They just need to train the right people, but they have the resources and the people to do it.

    Anyhow, my point is not that RedHat can't possibly make money. I'm sure they're going to make a fair amount of money in the short run. However, I think they're going to fall victim to their own hype. They're going to believe their own line, and they're going to start playing their chips foolishly. I believe the only way that RedHat's investors are going to make out well in the next 5 years, is if they understand their limitations. It may very well be prudent for them to cash out in the next year or so.

  • don't forget that they're also selling support
    so if you (or anyone else, for that matter)
    accidentally (or not) tramples your sandcastle
    they'll help you rebuild it :)


  • just a small correction to an otherwise praiseworthy post....it's not just nice that RH has their dist up for free, it's required :)

    GPL and all that, ya know

    otherwise, i echo your sentiment exactly...
    even though i didn't pay for my copy of RH5.2 (universities with t1 lines rawk) i probably will buy the next RH release mostly because i want to give something back...even if it's a couple bux to RH, it's still a couple more than they had before and it'll help them pay for raster to keep developing gnome (for a couple hours at least ;P)

    that having been said...i _like_ free stuff...mostly since i'm so broke, i've forgotten what money looks like...and because of the GPL i don't _have_ to buy RH's dist (or anyone else's for that matter) if i don't want to...but i want to :) I don't need the manuals (HOWTOs rawk), i don't need the cd media (cdr's rawk), and i don't need the support (usenet rawks ;P) but i'll probably buy it just the same mostly so that i can feel i'm doing a small part to help the community out...since i can't code anything more advanced than 'hello, world' buying RH's (or anyone else's) dist is one of the small ways i can contribute.

    linux, like life, is all about choice.
    at the risk of sounding too much like RMS, those of us who can't code worth a hill of beans should do all we can to help and support those who _can_ code so that _all_ of us can benefit from having the choices we all hold so dear, choices that the borg up in redmond (and most of the software industry) have been working so long to take away from us. whether you use GNOME or not, whether you use E or WM or fvwm2, whether you use X at all, we should all do our best to support these endeavors so that when the redmonites turn their lazy eyes at us, we will still, no matter what they do, have choices of _our own_ making and not theirs.

    the choices micros~1 gives us remind me of a quip attributed to Ford, joking about his Model T, which only came in black:
    (paraphrasing here) "You can have it in any color you want, as long as it's black."


  • A friend of mine was involved in testing and porting a Xenix app to Unixware for Y2k compliance. Whoever decided on Unixware should be taken out in the street and shot twice in the head (some marketing fop).

    Unixware had terrible support for video cards and scsi cards, and SCO support wasn't particularly helpful.

    I don't know where Michels gets the idea that selling Linux isn't going to work. I think that anyone selling a product that actually works is going to do a fair bit better.

    Once the higher-ups figure out what a POS SCO sells and stop making these stupid decisions to go with their overpriced product, SCO will be in deep.
  • Fraud involves misrepresentation. I don't see where RedHat is misrepresenting what it's selling or doing. Sounds like a bad case of sour grapes to me.
  • It's not the average Linux advocate, it's the average loud mouthed slashdot ranter who wants everything for free. Plenty of people, myself included, have paid for RedHat, and plan to continue to do so. They make a decent dist, and they give a lot back to the community.

    It is nice that RedHat has their dist up for free, btw, for things like the comp. sci. department of my school where we're strapped for money and there's a semi-lengthy process involved in actually paying for anything, so for the computers in our lab we just download the RPMS and install.

    But I (for personal use and at work), and many other people pay for RedHat. We're happy to. RedHat deserves the money.

    Please don't confuse the loudest people with the most people. There's a world of difference, as the fact that RedHat is still in business and doing well proves. If it was only the minority of people who didn't want everything for free, how do you think that RedHat would still be financially alive?

  • Me thinks that he is a wee bit scared of Linux an dthe good job that Redhat does at packaging Linux. After all isn't SCO supposed to be the UNIX for the PC, but now Linux is quickly taking that spot from SCO.

    Redhat has also contributed to the Linux community, buy employing some of its developers, at RH LABS and RH. I do not think that thay are doing a bad thing by selling there version of Linux, cause they also offer then fro download, and you can always get a cheepie cdrom from several Linux venders. The cheepie cdroms have everything from there ftp site, usually too...

    If Linux becomes more popular SCO may disappear completely.. I think that is what he is most afraid of....

  • After having Slack'ed for quite a while, I found it's almost as easy to build your own packages under RedHat, using "RPM -b?". The document "Maximum RPM" is quite some help, but it's easier looking at other people's spec files.
  • Of course SCO is going to whine about RedHat. They realize that Linux has been a better product for about 5 years now and they need to do something to keep their installed base. Has anyone here every met anyone who likes SCO? I haven't.

    -Rich
  • and if I'm not mistaken, don't they own the word "UNIX" now?

    You are mistaken, albiet understandably so. SCO owns the rights to the legacy AT&T Bell Labs designed source code for UNIX. However before they bought that, Novell (the previous owner) gave the UNIX trademark to The Open Group (formerly X/Open).

    It is technically possible for a non-AT&T/USL/SCO source licensed product to be officially UNIX -branded by TOG, albiet it rarely happens. TOG's rules make it difficult if not impossible for a free product, as they include requirements for some expensive commercial components such as Motif and CDE if memory serves. There has been talk about trying to get Linux (or at least one distribution) officially UNIX branded, but I don't know how far that has gotten.

  • but the Unix trademark might be worth a bit of money

    Unfortunately for SCO, they don't own that. Novell gave that to The Open Group (formerly X/Open) before they sold USL to SCO.

  • One expression I have heard is "You are not just selling the steak, you are selling the sizzle".

    Red Hat is selling a complete package with value added in things like support and a spattering of commercial licenses.
  • 1) this article does not say many things about why Red Hat selling free software is a fraud. Of course the main argument is obvious. But the article is a bit short to be really valuable.

    2) anyway, it seems to me that Michels is only afraid of Linux selling model, since RH begins to be attacked here and there (or at least some people look at it with attention), then it is easier for SCO to attack it. Michels will not attack a smaller / RH competitor... You always attack the bigger... when the bigger is not anymore the most appreciated... like Windows ;-)

    3) Michels should read the license. Even though it might be considered unethical by some people to sell the free work of others, that's legal given GPL. Therefore Michels' claim has no basement. There is no fraud.

    Michels should have think before he talked. Now he appears dumb. That's not good advertisement for him...

  • Memoirs of a former SCO developer. (Score:5)

    by Fish Man ( 20098 ) on Wednesday April 21, 1999 @07:10AM (#1923751) Homepage
    In 1994, I was programming SCO systems at work, we were an SCO shop.

    Early in 1994, I read an article stating that Linux 1.0 had been released, the first "stable" release.

    I had heard little things about Linux, and decided that it was time I checked it out.

    I got myself a Slackware distribution and installed it on my home PC.

    Having been the veteran of already 5 or 6 SCO installs at the time, my first impression was of how simple the install was. I had a working system in a half hour or so. I was particularly impressed with the fact that this thing had installed from my proprietary interface Mitsumi CDROM drive, all the commercial UNIX's at the time required a SCSI CDROM. I had PPP and X working after a couple of evenings of fiddling with the system. Much easier than SCO and most impressive!

    Remember, this was 1994. After a little experience with my home Linux box, it became apparent to me that there was NOTHING we were doing at work with SCO that we couldn't also do with Linux. We would have to replace some commercial apps we were using with SCO with freeware equivalents, but clearly the functionality was there.

    I floated a few trial balloons at work about migrating from SCO to Linux. I work for a pretty good employer, they were met with some interest.

    The first Linux box we set up at work was a little server built out of discarded parts for the purpose of letting SCO developers run Netscape Navigator on their desktops. You see, in 1994 and 1995, there was still not a port of Netscape to SCO. We ran Navigator on the Linux box and displayed the display on the SCO desktop, it worked great, we called this machine our "Netscape Server", even though, of course, it was not running the software, "Netscape Server", but was "serving" netscape client sessions to the SCO developers!

    Long story short: by early 1996 we had migrated completely from SCO to Linux for our application (a factory automation system) and there's been no looking back.

    SCO is the least stable, least intuitive, hardest to configure, hardest to scale, crashingest, and buggiest of the commercial UNIX distributions. Linux kicked its but in 1993 and does so even more today.

    Mr. Michels' comments are transparently the remarks of a CEO who's company is in it's death throws and needs a scapegoat to blame.

    But, they truly have no one to blame for their situation but themselves.

  • He must be having a bad day... (Score:3)

    by grek ( 30417 ) on Wednesday April 21, 1999 @05:40AM (#1923762)
    ...because it seems obvious to me that no-one sells *linux*, they sell the value added stuff they produce, like easy installation, manuals, support, etc.

    The raw materials, the kernel, GNU, and GPL apps are "free" but it's a non-trivial thing to put them all together and produce a working computer. I don't have the time (or prob. the ability) to do this so I can choose to pay RedHat, SuSe, Debian, Caldera, etc, for their particular packing of everyting into a neat bundle.

    In fact since I can download the distros via ftp or purchase them at 2UKP per cd, i.e. get them for free or next to free, this is a particularly strange kind of fraud.

    Come on everybody spell it with me...F...U...D (only this time the F is for Fraud)

    grek
  • >there is nothing propietary, nothing secret, in Redhat Linux distribution

    Yes, isn't it wonderful!

    What you seem to be pursuing is the answer to this question: How can Redhat differentiate themselves from other distribution vendors in a significant way within the context of a sensical, effective business model?

    The answer is obvious as Redhat has already done it. They differentiate by adding value to Linux and aiming their marketing at the Linux newbie. Linux newbies aren't going to know about $2 CDs generally and are going to want the manual that comes with the CD -- a good deal for $50 (especially since it provides some initial handholding which is often a good thing for newbies.)

    Once the newbie gets past the newbie stage and graduates to a more involved distribution, he's already shown his system to his friends and talked up Linux to just about anyone who'll listen and has helped generate a new batch of newbies, some of whom will buy Redhat Linux for $50.

    To augment newbie creation via word of mouth from happy ex-newbies, Redhat funds certain development tracks (Enlightenment, Gnome, etc.) which, in addition to providing great new software, generates huge amounts of goodwill within the general community where the denizens are happy to direct newbies to Redhat Linux as a good place to start. To further augment newbie creation, Redhat advertises in those few magazines which the Linux curious are most likely to buy, as well as advertises on certain websites the Linux curious might hit when looking for information on which to base a purchasing decision.

    Redhat has shown nothing but excellence with their marketing/positioning (*bow* Bob Young) and have maintained an exceptionally high ethical standard of behavior with the Linux community. Even if I don't use their product (I'm a content Slackware junkie) I do very much admire Redhat and feel they have made great contributions to the advancement of Linux overall. Redhat has proven themselves generous yet judicious in spreading the wealth around the community where it helps foster growth in the direction Linux most needs to grow -- the
    general-purpose computer user (coming soon to a computer near you!)

    My compliments, kudos and gratitude to the Redhat Linux folks.

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