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SCO's Michels Blasts 'Punk Kids' Linux 220

Posted by Hemos from the it's-time-for-flame-bait! dept.
assimilated writes "In the April 26th issue of Computerworld, president and CEO of SCO made a few well-put comments about the Linux "religion". I think he was right on. A legitimate vendor speaks out... Read the article to get fussy. " Hehe-I had no idea I was working for the Catholic Church. Does that mean I can't get married after all?
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SCO's Michels Blasts 'Punk Kids' Linux More

SCO's Michels Blasts 'Punk Kids' Linux

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  • How amusing. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Funny how this chap dismisses Linux much in the same way ol' Billy does, as being pretty much irrelevant. Yep, guys, Linux *is* irrelevant. It has no future. We're just a bunch of punks who haven't a clue that SCO and Microsoft produce far superior products. But, I guess you can include IBM, Oracle, Sun, Dell, VA Research, Sybase, Corel, StarOffice, HP, and others in the list of "clueless punks" or "religious nuts."

    Think I'll go call those two wily punks Larry Ellison and Lou Gerstner so we can get together, dye our hair pink and purple, and hum mantras.

  • SCO (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I now and have been a loyal user of SCO for years now...

    $1000 for a 5 user system, $150 per user for SCO's version of SMB, support? has anyone ever tried to get support from SCO? (Your not running a Compaq server? then thats not supported hardware).

    Where's the y2k patch? not out yet..

    and the list goes on...

    I still like SCO, but i'll never buy another license again, I now only recommend linux..

  • 'scuse mah French, but (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wouldn't get too worked up about the "punk" business. If you've ever had to deal with the press, you know they'll talk patiently to you for hours, then slap an article together out of the pieces that out of context are the most inflammatory. They're basically professional trolls.

    Oh, I think there were a fewer boners in there. Disparaging the Linux kernel as "light weight" and "easy to understand" for example. These things are manifestly good. As a programmer, I immediately associate those properties with "fast", "reliable" and "flexible".

    There are a few interesting things that become clear if you delete the usual corporate obfuscation, things which wouldn't have me too pleased if I were a SCO stockholder. Linux is driving SCO into more marginal (i.e. midrange) aplications. Historically, the low end, specifically the high end of the low end, is the best position for long term growth. The very high end isn't a bad nich either, but the worst place to be is in the midrange.

    The other intersting thing is that he effectively acknowledges that because of the creativity in the Linux community, they're going to have to continue to maintain Linux compatibility.

    The take home message is that Linux is on its way to becoming a de facto industry standard. Not bad for a buch of "punks".

  • Getting Emotional about an OS ... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 27, 1999 @07:44AM (#1913865)
    It seems very few people have a real handle on just why there is such a high level of emotion about Linux.

    It is not because Linux is so good terchnically. (It is. It is just that 'technically good' is not something most folks get all excited about.) The real issue is that OS's, and other software infrastructure, has become far to fundamental in our lives to be left in the control of special interests, be they corporate or government. And those corporations and agencies have been all to fast and willing to abuse that control.

    It is a social reaction to take back control of a very important facet of our lives.

    And about THAT, we can indeed get very emotional, and with good cause.
  • Not only that, he's got a bogus argument.

    It may take "millions of dollars to run tests", that simulate wide spread deployment and use.

    Linux users may - or may not - be doing ot for fun. However, wide-spread deployment and use are real, not simulated.

    Free software models threaten this man's entire business. Of course he reacts with angry bluster.


  • One of my ex-college mate told me that he worked as a consultant in SCO, and he himself give up on Unixware and OpenServer. He even make that exclamation that he is surprised that those two prodcuts even sells.


    Cappella
  • Not only that, but who is more likely to report problems? Bored, overworked test engineers, or end-users who are trying to get Linux to work on their set-up?
  • After reading that not very substantial article, I hardly feel "blasted." More like hit with a Nerf ball. He just parroted a few things we've already heard before with the bonus comment about being "punk kids." I just laughed. It's very hard to take these kind of comments seriously. He sounds like a man who has realized he is rapidly on his way to bankruptcy and is struggling to maintain his appearance of importance.

    Very amusing, but I somehow I don't see myself formatting my box and installing some other OS with "direction." Perhaps it is because I have become a disciple of the Linux Religion (TM). I am not open to the One True Religion of Commercially Supported Software (TM). My ability to think rationally has been taken from me by those Linux zealot punk kids, and now I need SCO to give it back! Please SCO! Show me the way of truth and light!

    Whatever.

    (I apologize for the sarcasm, but this article was just silly.)
  • Judging on SCO's latest crazy antics involving anything Linux, I'd have to say that they're the "Punk Kids" in this argument.
  • Let me reply to Mr. Michels, point by point:

    Companies like Red Hat...
    Actually, Doug, a lot of customers are buying that story. As you can see, actual sales of RH have been taking off, and that doesn't count the number of downloads of all Linux distributions. The question is, what value does SCO offer over RH, Debian, etc.?

    Linux didn't break any new ground...
    It doesn't need to. It embraces existing standards, and makes them more readily accessible. As a result, Linux settled into a niche in a lot of areas, especially around network services. It has a long way to go on the desktop, but is the Swiss Army Knife of networks, supporting IP, DECnet, Appletalk, amateur radio formats, etc.

    Linux products aren't particularly scaleable...
    That's the applications' fault, not Linux's. If you design your application properly, say using the Beowulf model, scalability becomes less of an issue. Linux is also much more portable than SCO. What hardware platforms does SCO support?

    Another thing is reliability...
    So, you're saying that the thousands of bleeding edge Linux people's time is wasted? Hardly. Just because it doesn't show up on a balance sheet somewhere, doesn't mean testing isn't being done. Some people like that "boring, hard, grubby work".

    It seems that Doug is making a last gasp at releveance. At this point, it would make more sense for SCO to take the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach: Build a SCO Linux distribution, test the hell out of it, slap the oh so precious SCO label on the box, and charge a ton of cash for a bulletproof, certified by SCO Labs distribution of Linux.

    And I'm not a Linux zealot. In fact, I'm probably going to move to Be as my desktop, but Linux really excells on the server side... Where Linux is good, it's really, really good..

  • Actually, Linux doesn't support over 900-some-odd MB of usable memory without patches, and no more than 2 GB with patches, at least yet. There is talk of allowing the 36-bit memory map of recent Pentium processors to be used, but it hasn't been implemented in a released kernel afaik.

    What I'm trying to say is, testing has nothing to do with it. It's well-known that Linux can't address that much memory - on i386 at least.

  • Posted by Condescending Unix User:

    I agree completely with your comments about SCO Unix. I learned to love Unix on SCO systems, but after getting deeper and deeper and seeing more and more problems with SCO, it was one of the main reasons I left my previous company. I now work on Solaris systems at work and use Linux at home and couldn't be happier with both of them.

    For a perfect example of just how 'reliable' SCO Unix was, check out this example. The /etc/group entries on our SCO Unix systems would only allow about 35 username entries for any single group. Any entries after that would not work. What a joke! (If this is some obscure SCO option that my sysadmin could have set higher, I'd be interested to know about it.)

    This combined with the fact that my sysadmin couldn't get anything to compile cleanly (or at all) under SCO, led me running screaming from this OS, and into the waiting arms of Linux and Solaris.
  • Posted by the order of His Majesty:

    ATT sold the Unix code to Novell a while back and the trademark to X/Open (I believe).
    Novell renamed the code UnixWare and eventually wound up selling it to SCO.
    That's why SCO has OpenServer and UnixWare.
    From what I understand, OpenServer is the existing (heavily reworked) remnents of their (and Microsoft's) Xenix product.
    They're trying to phase out OpenServer (understandibly) and moving to UnixWare (while working on Gemini).
  • Posted by Army No. Va.:

    And will support industry HW based on that processor architecture.

  • Posted by Army No. Va.:

    It is based on the AIX kernel with technology from AIX, UnixWare and PTX added. That tech will also be put into AIX 6000 where appropriate making Monterey IA-64 and AIX 6000 source compatible. Now whether IBM calls it AIX and SCO calls it UnixWare and Sequent, PTX remains to be seen or perhaps a totally new name that is company independent.
  • i mean, come on, he's obviously drunk.

  • NT is inferior because it is full of bugs yet has claims to be a release-quality product. We release stuff that is buggy, but we CLEARLY mark it as "development", i.e. the linux 2.1 series of kernels. Ones which numerous people used to be on the cutting edge, but which it was acceptable for bugs to be in. Plus, if a bug is encountered in open-source software, you can fix it.

    For similar reasons, NT is inferior because it is a "release quality" product that contains more bugs than development-release free software. Yes, many kernels in the 2.1 series were more reliable than NT. Do you realize what that says about the quality of NT?

    I've used open-source software that was marked as alpha quality that was far more reliable than anything Microsoft publishes.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • They're still doing OK, but now that the major DB vendors have come out with Linux versions, they're going to start losing customers.

    Most of their customer (I think) come from vertical market applications. The software developers have no real loyalty to SCO, they just use it because it's Unix and runs on cheap boxes. Linux is cheaper and faster and switching is easy for them. SCO should be afraid.

    Instead of bashing Linux they need to change their business model while they're still making money. Either push their own Linux distribution (with special 'SCO compatibility' and 'millions of dollars of testing' for added value) or open up their own Unix and distribute it for free. I think the first option has a lot more chance of working.

  • what an asshole. Some punk kids? Maybe SCO is feeling a bit of heat from the Linux distros and this fella doesn't like it. Real mature response.
  • based on the legacy presence for quite a long while (the main reason that NetWare is still alive).

    I must disagree with this. There are apparently new installs of NetWare - and besides, NetWare shouldn't be in the same category with SCO. It may not be UNIX, but it's still a damn fine, and stable, piece of software (unlike SCO's UNIX OSes and Windows NT, for example).
  • Nod. I think that's one reason that Sun seemed a little miffed at Linux for awhile - took the air out of their balloon that a free software system was taking away from their x86 UNIX business. But at least Sun seems to have mostly gotten over it. Sounds like SCO may not until it's too late - like when Linux completely flattens them.

  • The 2.0 kernel has real reentrancy problems. Essentailly, everything was under a single kernel lock. 2.1.x/2.2.x is much more fine grained (subsystem locks). Discussion for 2.3.x includes removing the big kernel lock alltogether.

    In practice, Linux manages to outperform supposedly more scalable OSes on a regular basis. Conclusion, more fine-grained locking is a win, but so far, the overall efficiency of the kernel has overcome the problem.

  • Crawling back to Microsoft for a spell will only motivate them all the more to pester the appropriate maintainer to fix his bugs.
  • I suppose people with graduate degrees and ten years of programming experience who help to develop Linux software are just "punk kids". I'll now wear a button around saying that.

    I believe a issue of Linux Journal had a survey of the major Linux kernel developers to debunk this myth. I couldn't find it on the web, perhaps someone else out there has a link. If I recall correctly, the credentials of the developers were impressive.
  • Interesting that the weaknesses he pointed out are often seen as strength by others.

    "No Roadmap" means "Market Driven". The Linux development is market driven, which means features being added is the one somebody needs. This is much more flexible than having to adhere to roadmaps.

    "Reliability testing too expensive". This is another important reason Linux is such a success, as the open development model allows for a much cheaper and more extensive reliabilty testing than SCO.
  • Just a childish rant. Nothing to see here, move along, move along - you have other things to do.

  • s/SCO/Microsoft/g, and it'd be just about the same.
  • We had Microsoft touting NT's superiority according to Mindcrap's tests, and now SCO is also saying that their OS is better... and AFAIK, Microsoft owns some (if not all) of SCO.

    Someone correct me on this one if I'm wrong. Even better, make your own comment.
  • ...involved one Compaq (yeah, yeah, I know... wasn't *my* choice) server, and SCO kept rebooting in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, also, in a so-called "server" edition, you had to buy the TCP/IP stack.... separately??!!?!?! How the hell am I supposed to run a "server" with no networking, huh?

    These words from the guy at SCO are the last gasp of the dying. I don't know *anyone* who likes SCO. Not nobody nowhere.

    -- adr

  • SCO has been the laughing-stock of the Unix community for the past decade. Anybody who ran a "real" Unix had nothing but pity for those forced to toil on SCO boxen. The only thing that kept SCO alive was that the hardware was cheap. SCO was one of NT's strongest selling points -- all the FUD that has been slung at Linux were real vulnerabilities in SCO...

    Michels refuses to acknowlege that it took Linux to legitimize Unix on consumer-level hardware.

    Bander

  • I hate to break it to ya, but us Linux finatics are being hired and at quite good salaries too.
    If we weren't so finatical about our OS, I don't think it would have come this far.
    --

  • just a few ideas on the article....main one being that the advantages of l*nux is the comparison with living breathing organisms that can readily adapt to the conditions and environment faster than the synthetic softeware system constructs that commercial software houses develop.

    Linux didn't break any new ground...but it's nice, elegant and small, easy to understand. So now we've got some punk young kids who've taken and engineered pieces around the Unix [kernel]
    i get annoyed at this. l*nux is for ever showing new bit's of new software useful or otherwise, it runs on many different types of hardware, it's demands for resources are few...it's adaptable and has the ability to be modified...the dna or source code of linux can be modified as required.

    They're not in control of their road map. They ship whatever happens to be current in the Linux community. When you're selling to [major corporations], they want to know who you are, where you're going, where you've been, how you treat customers.
    this is true, and i wouldn't want it any other way.... we have seen the inability of major software corporations to predict or adapt their software. remember microsoft,ibm, et.,al. and the internet? l*nux can be adapted quickly as it's environment or demands change

    Another thing is reliability. It takes millions of dollars to run [reliability] tests. It takes expensive people, expensive labs, expensive [electric] bills, racks and racks of hardware, and really boring, hard, grubby work. It isn't stuff that people do for fun at home with volunteers.
    I'm supprised to hear this from a vendor, (but they have their livelyhood at stake here folks!)cause it's simply not true. The internet supplies l*unix with the worlds greatest testing lab and the diversity of hardware and operating conditions (makes quick comparison to the natural world) is astounding. much like the amazon rain forrest. poor old sco can only build a 'simulated park' of the potential hardware forest....no money can buy, no corporation can hope to replicate the volume and variety of testing conditions that linux has undergone :) this could account for it's rapid growth

    Second, Linux products are not particularly scalable and don't handle multiprocessors well.
    dont know about this, can anyone comment?

    A: Linux is a religion. It's like considering the Catholic Church a competitor. I'm not a religion; I'm a commercial operating system.
    at least i dont have to pay to get in the door,pay to pray at the alter and pay to ask for guidence, na i'm a bloody l*nux heathen, who doesn't want to pay, just play with the source :)

  • this man is so scared he doesn't even know what he's talking about anymore. there is more value in a $50 red hat box than there is in a $1100 5-user version of SCO (with NO COMPILER, NO SOURCE, VERY FEW GNU TOOLS, NOR A DECENT MODULE ARCHITECTURE). hell even the $3.00 cheapbytes [cheapbytes.com] version offers more value!!

    speaking of modules... any idea on how much smaller SCO's hardware compatibility list is than linux'??



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

  • " We still think of ourselves as rebels, but we're boring establishment now. " said the dinosaurs, just before the meteor struck.
  • The last thing in the world I want is some cool app and have my customer go, "Oh, God, if I only had Linux, I could get that app."

    No news here; this is why SCO is aiming for binary compatibility [slashdot.org] with Linux for SCO UnixWare 7 [slashdot.org].

    The problem with this strategy is that SCO is thus placing itself in a market that strongly prefers free software, without offering much additional value in their proprietary products.

    Either SCO will wake up and smell the roses, or it will soon feed the roses.

  • SCO is being segfaulted [segfault.org] already, in response to their earlier whining [slashdot.org].
  • "I've said all along..."

    Yeah, you and Jesse Berst... ;)

    *grin, ducking under quills*
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

  • it's thanks to sco that i used linux. i'd been a long time unix user and had played with the two "toy" os's (freebsd and linux) but was quite happy to stick with sunos 4.1.4 (ah... heaven). then i got a job working with sco boxes.

    i'd never seen a unix box crash. well, the sun sparc server the admin in the dental school had stuck in a closet with no ventalation for a weekend... that box crashed... but otherwise i'd never seen a unix box crash.

    in my first month at this company, i learned more about fs recovery and fsck behavior then i care to re-remember. sco crashed, and it crashed a lot.

    so one weekend a co-worker and myself built a linux box (redhat 4.1) and managed to build a working linux based, sco targeted gcc. he ported the build environment, and i got the yp tools up and running (sco's being braindead).

    in a few months we had boxes that stayed up (barring power failures), functioning nis, and better driver support then sco ever managed.

    so thanks sco. for those of you using sco for development, look into the cross compiling solution. great stuff!
  • This guy's comments aren't worth getting worked up over. We *know* he's wrong, and that's it. Case closed.

    I actually laughed at the poor guy. Either he know SCO is going down the tubes, in which case he's desperately grasping at the slightest chance of life, or he actually *believes* that crap he's spouting and deserves to have his dinosaur of a company struck by the asteroid known to all as Open Source.

    "If you're tired of everyting come hitch a ride with me,
    You'll cry out with joy when you realize you're free,
    It's a trip like no other for your heart and mind,
    Leaving all but the future far behind."
    (Might as well have been singing about Open Source.)
  • I didn't think anyone could like them any less...
  • I propose that any future statements made by this company and/or individual be accompanied by the appropriate laugh track.
  • I remember my first experience with unix was in the early ninties on an SCO multi-user machine. It was always fucking up, and the admin had gone out of his way to make it as ugly and unuseable as possible. This probably delayed me really learning unix by several years.

    This guy - Michels - is a serious weenie. I don't like him. SCO a rebel? A "rebellious corporation"? Give me a break. Only an Apple fan could believe that a corporation could be "rebellious". 'Nix users aren't that gullible or stupid.
  • The guy is scared of Linux, man.

    What he said about Linux was true though --- without scalability, without having a good multiprocessor capability, Linux can't go BIG TIME.

    So, let's make the guy even more nervous by making Linux EVEN BETTER !!!
  • When one talks about SCO, one thinks of two other things --- Xenix and Dinosaur.

    And talking about Xenix --- do you know that the AMF corporation, --- Yes, the one who supplies bowling equipments to those bowling centers --- still uses Xenix to run their bowling alley machines ?!

    Recently I popped into one of my friend's bowling center and I was surprised to see that his bowling machines were running XENIX !!!!

    And the kick is he had just installed the machines last year !!!!

    Wow, talk about Dinosaurs.

    SCO is the supplier of DINOSAUR-TECH to all those DINOSAUR corporations, and AMF sure is one of them.
  • scalability isn't really the ability to cluster.
    what these drones mean when they say scalability is the ability to improve the performance of one machine by throwing more and more processors into it.
    linux's ability to run on eight processors is not touted as a main feature for a reason.
    OTOH, i'm not sure i've ever heard of a more than 4-way p2 box, and i'm not sure how many other platforms SCO runs on...
  • Damn! It just sucks to be him.
  • Sure Linux doesn't have an official roadmap, but when I look at SCO's "Roadmap" I see that I have to wait several years to get the features I want.

    And just how did they "beat" the minicomputers? SCO is pretty much considered bottom of the barrel as far as commercial Unicies go.

    Also they don't own "Unix". The Open Group does. They bought Unix system labs from Novell, but they didn't get the Unix trademark
  • Sounds like sour grapes more than FUD. Well maybe his marketing people should teach him how to speak.
  • I personally remember SCO's Xenix release, the headaches involved with a particular client and SCO's $100 a QUESTION. (ala, what..., where and how amounted to $300.00 US) One particular thing comes to mind: USR 14.4 modem support, I hacked for a few days to get the damn thing to work, "their" tech support asked me how the hell I did it and then being nice guy I am, faxed them the info. I'm positive I never received credit, and I don't care..., but I DO hate being catogorized as a "nobody" just because I use Linux now.

    Note: Now that I think about it a bit, this had to be done under a version or two after Xenix. 4.?

  • First the "fraud" line, now "punk kids". And not a good thing to say about SCO. Desperate. And not just a little sad.

    You reading this, SCO?

  • Did anyone notice this part:

    Q: But you see Linux providing modules for SCO?

    A: As far as I'm concerned, it's free R&D. A lot of developers who have always preferred Unix are developing on Linux. The last thing in the world I want is some cool app and have my customer go, "Oh, God, if I only had Linux, I could get that app."

    [Knocks metaphorically on Doug's head] Hello???? Is anyone in there? Where the developers lead, users will eventually follow, because that's where the applications will be.

    As far as the Unix-at-home crowd of developers, the vast majority now use Linux or *BSD. Some people I know have Solaris x86. But SCO? Hah.

    As a former SCO admin, I can say that I'm glad to be done with it. Of course I have myself to blame becuase I picked it. However, back in '92, there weren't as many choices for cheap Unix, and my company was on a very tight budget.

  • Yeah, you're right.. but it shouldn't be that way.. We should try to keep objective and not get emotional about stuff like this.

    oh, well.. *sigh*

    vr
  • Well.. I hope I won't be flamed for this, but he has a point (where's the fire extinguisher?)
    There are many people that treat linux like it was sacred, and doesn't have any flaws.

    F.ex. when the mindcraft test was released, many people instantly denied it.
    The mindcraft test is a bad example, but what about the process/thread test where it was shown that WindowsNT actually handled forking and threading faster than linux (I'm sorry I don't have a reference, but I read about it in an LJ issue once). In this case it required a quick fix, but nevertheless it illustrates my point.

    Linux is not perfect, and we have to accept that, but many refuse to.

    I feel that there is a group of people that claim linux is the best and the only operatingsystem to use, but we have to keep objective and keep our minds open for other possibilities, or we will become known as short sighted nerds and hackers.

    vr
  • "when you were good, you were really, really good. but when you were bad, you were horrid" -- Hail, _Kirk_. must listen to that song again.
  • The thread sw article in LJ actually showed that NT did slightly better than Linux at very high loads (> 30 I think the number was) but that Linux generally did better than NT under realistic loads.

    The very high load situation could be fixed by a few slight changes to the kernel.

    forking is much more expensive under NT than under Linux btw...

    Linux a religion? hmm, I don't mind as long as nobody starts converting people using swords:)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Now that ought to get some attention...

    I was very disturbed by Mr. Michel's comments in this article (and the previous blustery article) where he states that OSS is just free R-and-D and that "Hey! It's free software! We can take what we like!".

    I wouldn't put it past SCO to find OSS software copied directly into SCO releases and sold as their own after hearing comments like that.

    Should we be worrying about commercial ventures taking OSS code and selling it as their own in non-OSS products?

    Are there any lawyers out there, or do any Slashdotters out there know of a lawyer, that would be willing to work (pro bono?) on lawsuits in this area should it come to that.

    Is anyone else bothered by Michels' comments?

  • ``...involved one Compaq (yeah, yeah, I know... wasn't *my* choice) server, and SCO kept rebooting in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, also, in a so-called "server" edition, you had to buy the TCP/IP stack.... separately??!!?!?! How the hell am I supposed to run a "server" with no networking, huh?''

    One word: Digiboard.

    Of course, that's not exactly a ``server'' as we know it today.

    We had an SCO system at a remote clinic that, from time to time, I had to get in the car and drive for 45 minutes in order to fix a simple problem that could have been done in five minutes had it been possible to hang it off our Ethernet. The pisser was that the clinic was on our network. Each of the clinician's PCs had an Ethernet card hanging off our network and an asynch connection to the Digiboard in the SCO system. Dumb terminal emulation was required to get into the SCO-based application. Stupid huh? Don't forget that SCO made a bunch of money selling inexpensive systems like this back in the days when LANs were quite expensive.

    The fact that SCO was selling the IP stack separately was not unreasonable ten years ago. I doubt that they do that now, though. If they do, then SCO is dumber than I thought and it's no wonder the OSS/Intel/*nixes are eating their lunch. ("How dare those punks screw up our pricing schedule!!")

  • Nuff said.

    I've said all along that other Unixes will be hurt well before MS feels the pain.
  • The only UNIX I've disliked more than SCO was DGUX, which is now, thankfully dead and buried.

    My own personal experience with SCO has been that it crashes at any hint of demand on the server. I can say without fear of argument that NT 4.0 is far more reliable than SCO. Imagine that.

    The only people I know who run SCO now are ones who are stuck with legacy software that only runs on SCO.

    When your product is crap, it doesn't matter if it swirls at the bottom of the bowl!

    Ok, enough rants, here's where I address some of his issues:

    (Paraphrased) Linux has no central support, and that scares away corporate customers.

    This only scares middle managers in large corporations who habitually spend most of their calories seeking out scapegoats when their poorly managed staff using inadequate tools don't get their unrealistic deadlines completed on time. Expensive support contracts are way overrated. Now that I run my own business, I'd never spend the gobs of money support outfits require for some of their products. $195/hour for wimpy Microsoft tech support? Not.

    Linux has no 'roadmap'.

    I have news for corporate America: There aren't any roads in today's software market. The days of monopoly control of a particular software market segment are gone, gone, gone; and the Four Horsemen who are making it so are the Internet, Linux, MP3, and data encryption. And there's a whole mongol army of marauders just behind the hill, who are ready to trample on any company that can't change fast enough to meet the next competitive threat. No software house can hope to maintain the short turnaround that Open Source software, with its hoards of volunteer programmers, achieves each and every day.

    Linux isn't UNIX; SCO owns it.

    SCO may own a brand name, but there's lots of UNIXes out there, or UNIX-like operating systems, that kick the snot out of it. If SCO is UNIX, then I'll have none, thanks.

    'Punks' stole UNIX, and play at making a viable OS.

    This was an unfortunate comment, and will likely be engraved on his tombstone. In any case, anyone who has touched both operating systems knows that Linux is much stronger than SCO, so trying to dis the way Linux came to be is immaterial. Using the word punk just shows that this guy has his head, and therefore his company's head, stuck in the old ways of thinking. Here's roadkill waiting to happen.

    Enough venting for the day! I'm off to use my Linux workstation to get real work done at my ISP business.

  • Sure, you could say that and be accurate at the same time.

    To infer that Linux is inhearently not reliable becasue it has not had corporate lab testing is not accurate. That is a case of sophistry hiding in bad logic.
  • Mr. Michel does an interesting spin on the issue of Linux and responsibility. He doesn't say that Linux is or is not reliable. Instead he just describes the heavy resources that a corporation needs to use to test reliability. This is intended to lead you to believe that Linux has no testing because the community doesn't have a centralized lab with technicians sweating away hours over structured tests. He doesn't even make passing reference to the varied, real world, applied testing that comes from millions of users' experience.

    What would you trust? Millions of users' real world experience vs. thousands of hours from a few (maybe few dozen) technicians with constructed tests. Isn't real world experience the final testing ground for commercial software today? Or are patches and service packs and incremental releases frequently released because commercial vendors didn't want to ship a fully tested product to begin with?

    mikeraz
  • Fact is, unix and it's funny little varients
    are still no match for MVS and big irons reliability. They're toys in comparision.
    The Suits know this... and you don't.
  • These are just the words of a very desperate man. The Linux movement is sucking the air completely out of SCO. This happened before. Remember the Mark Williams Co.? They made Coherent which was the first x86 Unix clone I used. An interesting product, they actually had a version that would work on a 286! But Linux came along and ran over them like a freight train.

    The same thing is happening to SCO. They cannot compete with Linux so insane ranting is about the only business option left to them.

    Don't worry, they will be out of business soon and everybody knows it.

    My computer, my way. Linux.
    --
    Howard Roark, Architect
  • SCO is like my grandfather.

    Once his mind is made up, come hell or high water, he is not changing it back.

    SCO have their mind made up about Linux. I'm honestly surprised about their Linux Binary Compatibility thing - maybe there's hope for them yet.

    Then again, I was at a Unix conference once, and the SCO guy was up talking about Openserver 5. At the Q&A, someone asked whether SCO will have a certain feature 'like Linux', and the guy just lost it and started yelling at him.

  • Moron. (Score:1)

    by Zico ( 14255 )

    Yeah, I guess that's why SCO took Microsoft in front of the European Commission about 18 months ago to nullify a contract with them, and why one of their senior VPs referred to the incident as "dealing with the devil." Got any more FUD for us, Sparky?

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Gee, how long did those take, less than three months? Those were the alledgedly "release quality" products, so why are you trying to blunt the previous poster's remarks with your strawman argument of, "Gee, of course development releases have bugs!" Who said anything about the development releases?

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • SCO didn't support that Microsoft code for all that long. The issue was decided by the European Commission in late 1997, so I'm sure that SCO filed the complaint a while before then. SCO only owned Unix[tm] since 1995 (they bought the rights from Novell, who had bought them from AT&T, the company that made the original deal with Microsoft back in the '80s.), so we're probably talking two years max. I believe that SCO had been compaining to Microsoft for at least a year before they took them in front of the EC.

    As for why they went to Europe, it's because the EC is a lot stricter in these big guy vs. little guy battles. I remember an article at the time even discussing how companies going outside the U.S. to air their complaints had become a trend even before this case. News.com or ZDnet had that article, just do a search on "SCO" AND "Microsoft" AND "european commission" and it should turn up at one of them.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • I think if SCO were to create their own Linux distribution, that they would do considerably better in the marketplace than they are by clutching like grim death onto their aging code base. The SCO name still has some value, after all, but I think their Unix competetiveness is waning.

    I guess this leads us to a more unusual thought. Microsoft could not only sell a Linux distribution, but would likely within months outsell all the other Linux distributors combined. I saw something like this happen with their game publishing arm. From nothing to mega-hit sales numbers. It's a phenomenon. If you're writing a game, you go to Microsoft first, because even if it turns out like crap, you will sell hundreds of thousands of units gauranteed, and a good game will probably break 1M units. If it's anyone else, no matter how good or established or gigantic, the sell-throughs are far smaller. Microsoft just has an incredibly powerful sales system.

    =-ddt->

  • Hey, i'm a protestant and the guy call me catholic, he wiil make the guys of IRA explode everything :-)))))))

    man, the SCO guys are going Crazy :-)))



  • Hey, i'm a protestant and the guy call me catholic, he wiil make the guys in Ireland explode everything :-)))))))

    man, the SCO guys are going Crazy :-)))



  • I'm neither a punk, nor a kid. I've never flamed anyone on-line, and the two times I've been flamed, I responded in a rational, reasonable manner that actually got a rational, resonable response from people that originally called me all sorts of nasty things.

    Having said all that, I hate to say it, he *is* an ass. :) An ignorant one too, though I suppose the two frequently go together.
    ----------

  • Would you like to tell me where you got that info from?

    Its actually pretty well known that Microsoft has owned part of SCO for years. They took an equity stake in SCO in exchange for the licensing rights to XENIX. I believe the amount is actually about 14% instead of 15% however. For what its worth, Novell also owns about 13% (which they took as an exchange for USL) and the Micheal's (Doug and Larry) each own between 9 and 11%.

    While it is unlikely that Micrsoft can directly force SCO to do something, as the largest stockholder, it is also unlikely that they have no influence at all.

  • Maybe you're not a punk, but surely a kid. "asshole" is no more answer than his talk...

    How do you think suits & corporates of all worlds can interpret such remarks of yours ? They just think you're not mature, then linux guys are not mature, then linux is immature...

    Be the white dove : fly above crap rampants... La bave du crapeau n'atteint pas la blanche colombe... ;-)
  • > They're not in control of their road map.
    > They ship whatever happens to be current
    > in the Linux community. When you're selling
    > to [major corporations], they want to know
    > who you are, where you're going, where
    > you've been, how you treat customers.

    What I understand from that is Michels means Linux cannot provide long term insgiht and can always possibly crumble (because no one really have the product). That's strong menace for customers.

    I agree for the long term view & I think some kind of w3 org like would be cool for Linux.

    But Linux can only strengthen, since I believe we passed the critical mass. It's now a social phenomenum, more and more people believe in it, and that makes it more interesting to others. That's like mobile phones. Who could say mobile phones will disappear ?

    One can compare Linux with RISC cpu, Network Computers or Java (two have nearly disapeared and the other is not as strong as it was supposed to become). But you'll see that Linux has been more backened by big corps & is increasely (IBM, Intel & recently Dell & HP are astonishing examples). In fact Linux came into light at the right moment, just when corps saw that Microsoft was not so untouchable...

    What about Asimov ? Ok I just finished "Foundation & Earth" and his books are really great ! But that's not ad I want to do here (or not only ;-)
    Asimov proposed that when people believe in something, it makes that thing stronger, whether that thing really exist or not at the beginning, when people believe in it, it becomes a terrible force & nearly nothing can oppose it.

    I think Linux has the potential to become such a force, and I dare think that even though Linus, A. Cox and others were in the same plane and it... had some problem... :'-{ then Linux would perfectly survive without not much harm.

    Linux is now part of humanity.
    And maybe in some decades, people will make it the 8th wonder of the world ;-)
  • I actually thought Michels had some points, as someone who has used a few Unices (including SCO, HP-UX, Solaris and Linux). But his (otherwise valid) points are undermined by the fact that SCO is a sad piece of crap. You get some very high quality characteristics in OSS like Linux, and you also get some very inappropriate oversights. SCO always has been and forever will be the OS I will never consider for anything.
  • I let it go the first time, but now I'm pissed. "Linux is a religion"..."punk young kids"..."no one to sue but a kid in Norway"..."We can steal what we want"... [some parts paraphrased].

    It is clearly obvious how scared, desperate, and bitter Michels is towards Linux. He can see his bottom line shrinking right from under him. I can picture him in the interview, I bet you his heart was pounding and the spit was flying out of his mouth as he spouted his angry vitriole.

    Keep whining, SCO. Because your customers (current or prospective) can see right through them and your ship will only sink faster.

    I've refrained from bashing SCO, but I will now do so at every chance I get.
  • There's a slight difference btw the dinosaurs a couple of million years ago and this one. The former didn't see the meteor coming. This one did. It only needs to realize that the meteor has already struck and that by now it is dead and smelling...
  • Doug Michels said:
    Second, Linux products are not particularly scalable and don't handle multiprocessors well.

    Oh I can recall the kernel panics so well on SCO Openserver SMP systems when a Windows client tried to connect with TUN NFS. What did they do when we (the place I used to work) mentioned this? They said that TUN NFS was implemented wrong. Nice justification of a kernel panic. They patched it by now, but it took well over 6 months and it's costed my former POW quite a couple of bucks in support actions...
  • Well considering SCO has been arround the block a few times, you could say that SCO UNIX has both structured lab testing AND user testing.
  • puh-lease! Like SCO can actualy call itself a decent Unix distro. No thanks, I'll stick with AIX.
  • Well, they have that NonStop Clusters technology (single-system image on 6 nodes), and will soon have UnixWare/ptx running on Sequent's boxen (128 quad nodes... anyone played around with these?).
    Anyway, I know UnixWare is certified on some of Unisys' stuff, which is 6-10 CPU's on a single box.
    Does anyone have experience with UnixWare on a >4 cpu machine? Please share your experiences.
  • It's interesting when you think about how AT&T (Bell Labs) released AT&T SystemV R2 to everyone for free and it (after some time at berkley) grew into r4 that is now the -arguably- defacto standard in commercial releases.

    When AT&T sold the 'UNIX' license to Novell (UNIXWare), I always felt it just became another commercial OS that no can play with and you have to wear a tie to get in front of. Imagine, and it's not that hard, Linux as the New AT&T sVr4, and AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, & even SCO are 'commercialy adding features' to the OS in the same way they did with sVr4.

    Idunoh, It seems like mabye embraceing Linux is the right path.
  • Funny its seems I've heard Gates say similar things. The comments about religion, its nothing new, no "road map" (oh oh buzzword bingo), must have companies for real tests, intellectual property fear, and of course companies want to buy from "real" companies. My god - does he write stuff for M$ or just read it and repeat?

    -cpd
  • TI SYS V wants a license for the stack too.. bad enough the cards are still 600 dollars for a dinosaur like this machine. It requires a password keyed to your SPA (software protect adapter, an internal slotted card for cpu id.. when you change the mobo, you can just take the spa out and snap it into the new board. nifty)
    and you would have to pay another 600 dollars for it.

  • Is it any coincidence that "Linux" rhymnes with "Sucks"...?

    No, because it doesn't - except as a slant rhyme.

  • Yup (Score:1)

    by for(;;); ( 21766 )
    They've tried giving away copies of UnixWare (or was it OpenServer) free to home users as a way to combat Linux's popularity with hobbyists. It hasn't worked, of course. Opening up their code probably wouldn't save them either, although it would really help out the free software community.

    The "SCO Linux" idea is the best one I've heard for SCO to save itself. They would have to do it quick, before all their customers finish porting their stuff to an existing distro.
  • another $1000 for software development tools, SCO could be a *very* big deal today.
    If they had sold it for $100 or even $200 they would have sold *many* more licenses, made much more money, and maybe even kept up with the rest of the *nix world's progress over the last 15 years.
    If they hadn't put up that major entry barrier, SCO (with X) could have given M$ a run for the PC market.
    But wait - SCO *IS* (*was*?) M$!!

    "I remember now - THAT was the equation!"
    -- Brock, stardate whatever
    (What Are Little Girls Made Of)

    SCO never existed except to kill the PC unix market. Its end is at hand.
    Is it any surprise to see the CEO in hysterics?
    Is it any surprise to hear the CEO FUD the system which has made it impossible to keep the lid on PC *nix any longer?

    Go on, Mr. Michaels. Tell us what's so great about your product. Tell us one thing it can do better than Linux, FreeBSD, or, for that matter, SolarisX86!
    Tell us *why* we should buy your overpriced trash.
    Don't just call us kooks, anybody can do *that*!
  • I am not surprised at this reaction from the CEO of SCO, lets face it SCO have more to lose than Microsoft with the ascension of Linux.

    Look at the market that SCO aim at, low end x86 based UNIX servers. Things like branch servers etc. This is exactly the market that Linux has been penetrating so well recently.

    The reason SCO are reacting so violently is that this is their /only/ market. Every Linux box installed here is almost certainly one SCO license and hence revenue taken away from SCO.

    It really isn't a surprise that SCO would want to spread more FUD about Linux than even Microsoft. After all, Microsoft have a load of other revenue streams that aren't affected by Linux whereas SCO hasn't

    Joe_90

    --
  • My original reaction was that he was cranking up his own FUD machine. I've read some other stuff from him where he has been less than kind to Linux. I guess this doesn't surprise me, Linux is in direct compettion with SCO and I'm guessing that they are feeling a little heat.

    I'm running Solars X86 on one of my PC's and as a result of that I belong to a Solaris mailing list. One of the guys on the list works for Sun and he has the same attitude towards Linux as Doug Michels. I think it's a natural reaction. Linux gets a TON of free press, most of it good, and the press can't get enough if it. Meanwhile these old-time Unix guys are watching this and doing a slow burn.

    I think that it might benefit these Unix guys to try to capitalize on the popularity of Linux and show themselves in a positive way(thus promoting Unix), instead of coming across as angry and spitefull.

  • Testing

    A company can afford to pay people to do very complete testing -- black box, glass box, etc. This type of testing is something nobody would want to do unless they're being paid, but to make sure something is rock solid, it really has to be done.

    Linux has hundreds of thousands of people using and testing, and of those probably thousands, at least hundreds, are trying to fix any bugs they find. *But*, they are not actively looking for bugs, trying out every possible configuration, stress-testing the system, giving it worst-case scenarios. These people are just using the systems and if a bug happens to pop up during their use, they'll report or fix it.

    The recent Mindcraft study helps illustrate this point. The machine they were using to do the test was wierd. It had 4 gig! of memory! In a formal test, a configuration like this might have been covered, but in informal testing, you'd just have to hope some guy was lucky enough to also have a machine with 4 gig on hand and had run it through its paces.

    But in the end, the benefits of going with Linux beats the benefits of formalized testing most of the time.

    With the huge Linux user base there's a pretty good chance every established piece of code has been pretty thoroughly tested. Also, if a bug pops up the source is available so you can try to fix it yourself. If what you're working on is interesting enough, you might even be able to get people help you track down the bug. Good luck getting that with SCO Unix

  • I once worked on a political campaign where the incumbant paid off one of the canidates in the other party to run a negative campaign against the incumbants main compentitor. Well, I am getting the same sort of feeling here.

    Check out this nice little bit from SCO's SEC Filings in February.

    Common Stock Approximate
    Five Percent Shareholders, Directors Beneficially Percentage
    and Certain Executive Officers Owned Owned(1)
    ------------------------------------ ------------ -----------

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

    Now am I the only one who thinks that Novell and Microsoft might not mind the president of SCO slamming Linux. It is just a thought. But if I was a major shareholder in SCO, I don't think I would like Microsoft dumping $25 million worth of shares.

  • Just as an aside, I can recall when Mr. Michel (and his father) and users of their OS (Xenix) were considered sort of "religious zealots".

  • Religious OS zealots are not only confined to linux. I've read comments here, usenet, zdnet, etc from people who are religious about MS, os2, *BSD, Solaris, HURD, Amiga, hell even the Sinclair Spectrum. It's common behaviour of a segment of any userbase/fanbase. Have you never met anyone who's religious about a particular make of car, stereo, tv, etc, or a writer, actor, director, musician?

    *Possibly* there are proportionaly more linux zealots (I doubt it) but you have to remember that coming from closed source OSs to the GPL world of linux can be such a `revalation' that its natural for folks to get a bit evangelical now and again.

    grek
  • The ever popular "Oh, God, if we only had Linux"...

    In 1996, we found that killer app that you could get on Linux but not Unix.

    C++.

    SCO Open Server V came with a bogus, buggy implementation of C++. So we did what every red-blooded American hacker would do: grab the G++ port.

    Cygnus hadn't bothered to port C++ to SCO. We had to root around and find a private user who had ported it.

    When Cygnus drops your Unix platform, you know you're marginalized.

  • Is DG/UX dead and burried?, DG are still advertising it on their web site. I have to disagree that is was a worse OS than SCO Unix, it had excellent disk management tools and hapily ran SAMBA, NFS, sendmail and web servers. I set my first ever web server up on a DGUX AViiON and we had an UPTIME of 300 days on a busy public site.

    By contrast SCO is awful. I think it must be the only UNIX that sells TCP/IP as an option and it is very poorly documented. Support was poor and the longest UPTIME we managed was about 7 days. However, I suspect Data General may agree with you that DG/UX is worse, I see you can buy AViiONs pre-configured with DG/UX, SCO Unix or Windows NT, an excellent choice which should satisfy every user.
  • But I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call SCO a legitimate vendor. In fact, SCO is one of the best reasons for Linux there is. I feel no sympathy for SCO; had they been a bit less greedy and a bit more into improving their system they could be reaping the benefits today. But a vendor with ideas like TCP/IP being an 'addon', and producing the worst unix I've ever had the displeasure to work with, they're just getting what's coming to them.
  • surely this proves one thing

    THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OBSOLETE HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE

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