The end is near for SCO (hopefully)

[Richard Pieri]

On May 8, 2009, at 10:10 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Go in today's data centers and see how big corporations use Linux.  
> Why would Red Hat and SuSE produce Enterprise verisons if it is not  
> a commercial

Red Hat and SuSE are products built on top of Linux.  They are  
commercial.  That does not make Linux commercial.

Mac OS X is built on top of Mach and FreeBSD.  It is commercial.  That  
does not make either Mach or FreeBSD commercial.

Circa 1990, Linux products were not competition for SCO.  Linux did  
not start to become a significant commercial player until around  
1996.  SCO's competition of the early 1990s took the form of Sun,  
Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Digital as the big names with lesser names  
like Data General, Sequent and Unisys.  All hardware vendors.  Venix  
was never really competition against SCO, never mind the big guys.   
Commercial, yes, but not competition.

Thus I stand by my statement: SCO prospered through the 1990s because  
it was a commercially supported OS that was not locked to a particular  
hardware vendor's products.

And I will add that a lot of why SCO failed as an OS is the disaster  
that was Project Monterey.  Linux was on the rise and Intel failed to  
deliver Itanium anywhere near schedule.  IBM, SCO, Intel and Sequent,  
had an OS -- a very cool OS by the way based on my experience with the  
AIX 5L developer previews -- that nobody wanted and no hardware to run  
it on.  This lead to SCO divesting itself of everything except  
Tarentella and selling it all to Caldera.  SCO changed its name to  
Tarentella and independently until 2005 when it was bought by Sun.   
That is the ultimate demise of the old SCO.

What was Sequent doing there?  Sequent was a pioneer in high- 
performance SMP and NUMA architectures including read-copy-update.

Meanwhile, Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group.  IBM pronounced  
Project Monterey deceased, acquired Sequent, and began to focus on  
Linux.  The SCO Group found itself without an OS and without the big- 
name partners that were expected to prop it up.  The SCO Group's  
management decided to sue IBM for contributing code from Project  
Monterey to the Linux kernel.  We all know how that is turning out.

--Rich P.