arl critique: www_sco_com_scosource_letter_to_linux_customers_html

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date: 20030514T2330
source: http://www.sco.com/scosource/letter_to_linux_customers.html

Is this a letter from a dying company? It seems that SCO does not live long... i.e. is anybody buying a) their software? b) rights to use Unix code? The letter contains same kind of argumentation I have seen by other commercial companies threatened by Linux success. SCO believes Linux is a derivative of Unix ... nice ... better than to say Linux is a Unix clone. But still I do not see any Unix derivative in Linux except it works much better and safer than SCO. Linux was long waited happening .. when I released it the unixoidian world had only stolen unices and Minix. Not a real free unixoids at all, Minix was copyrighted in a manner that it could be copied to students - and its author allways said that the book publisher had the rights to it this way avoiding that he himself did own the thing.. At the time Minix did work only with i88/i286 processors, and it run only in i86 mode. So I had a programming group in HUT to port Minix into i386 world, and they succeeded (Erwice WWW browser was developend in same kind of a group work). At Minix time we developed i386 modifications, but the OS itself was copyrighted and not freely distributable and so the diffs could only be released. When I first had the opportunity to have Linux I was gazed - and after I released the OS to others they were too.. SCO like other commercial software producers are using as an argument the common urban legend "Commercial software is built by carefully selected and screened teams of programmers working to build proprietary, secure software." - Linux is international Internet based work, which has people from all the world, even from the countries US thinks are pro terrorism (because they are not supporting US foreign policy). I have used SCO in commercial installations, because at those days (around 96) my customer needed to run ISDN routing software (I asked from the German software manufacturer why they did not port their software into Linux and their response was "nobody is buying software into free operating system". Ok I did not think anything else than that the company contained lots of dofuses (doof) people. Actually I know German arrogancy and stupidity quite well.. Nice case was when trying to buy Ethernet adapter from computer shop around end of 80's, the sales person (naturally male) said Ethernet is only for huge computers - I did not even try to argue (because with Germans it does not help at all). When I used the installation SCO had to be bought as parts like core, networking, and development. Each part was quite expensive .. even the OS limited user amount to 4 in the cheapest installation. The system at that time was ugly. It feeled like those earlier sysV systems I worked with 80's. One nice feature at that time was that after Intel started to produce and sell only new generation i486 processors SCO did not work with the processor. argh. So I needed to buy 10 processor reserve of old other manufacturer i486 processors. SCO contained at that time also lack of driver support, because the OS was fading away already at that time. I have personally flied a long way to fix 3c509 driver problem in customers installation - it was impossible to fix through Internet. After that SCO integrated everything into one package .. nice .. but it was really unstabile, and it could accidentally remove a single file contained UI configuration(?), and after that one almoust needed to reinstall the whole OS.. naturally this was a work of screened teams of programmers. Quite oldish argument is also that many Linux developers do have a Unix development background, and they have seen original Unix code. nice. Mostly the original Unix code is really uglish and buggish code (at least it used to be). The only real help by accessing the original Unix code is to notice how not do the thing. I do not thing any parts of sysV has been copied into Linux, why should it be? There are thousands of Linux developers capable of doing things better than in sysV. "Linux's unrestricted authoring process" hmm .. I thought Linus was restricting at least kernel level contaminations (sysV code is naturally considered as contamination). Utah is naturally the best place to sue IBM. It is really pleasing to notice SCO relates its own case to music industry. In this way they might win the souls of stupid persons, which might think Linux resembles somehow mp3s. So after all I think these are the last noices from a soon dead company, they might succeed to suck some money from IBM (because US courts seem to contain woodeyed judges), but they do not win other software or hardware manufacturers on their side. The lack of functioning drivers for new hardware will eventually kill SCO. Links Finnish: SCO Linux -lisenssi |

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