Ask SCO Presidents About Linux Adoption

For years, SCO has been prominent among the "I'd rather fight than switch to Linux or Open Source!" crowd.. Now they've done a radical about-face and are moving into both Linux and Open Source big-time. Mike Orr is president of SCO's Tarantella division. David McCrabb is president of the server division. Between them, they ought to be able to answer almost any question about SCO + Linux and/or Open Source that you post below between now and noon tomorrow U.S. EDT (assuming your question gets selected as one of the "top 10 -15" we send to them, that is). Their answers will appear next week.

Conflict of Interest

Per your Schedule 14A [sec.gov], Microsoft owns 4,217,606 (11.9%) shares in The Santa Cruz Operation. This makes Microsoft one of the two largest shareholders in SCO.

How has SCO handled the investment of Microsoft, while at the same time offering a competitor to Microsoft. In addition, does the investment of Microsoft cause problems when dealing with the Open Source Community. Specifically, does the Open Source Community have reservations dealing with SCO because of their connections with Microsoft.

Licensing and technology

I've noticed you've started to open-source parts of your user-space tools - good for you, and you're especially comitted given that you use the BSD license. But what I'm worried about is some of the technology that's in the kernel. Does AT&T still have any say over some of the SVR4 kernel source, or do you own all of that? If AT&T owns it, could AT&T stop any potential open-sourcing of kernel-space components as being "derived works"? If you own it, could you force other SVR4 licencees to open up their kernels? Or maybe just open up yours, and "encourage" projects that emulate features found in other SVR4 unicies.

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Motif and Linux

SCO (like most SVR4 vendors) pacakges Motif (with CDE) in their OSes. As a Motif licensee (and a member of the Open Group) you have the power to lobby for a free version of Motif to enable further development on Linux. This would be of innumerable benifit to the community and to application vendors who don't necessarily want to staticly link with Motif. Would you consider lobbying TOG, perhaps with other member Linux companies like SGI?

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Tarantella vs Citrix

Dear Sir,

The company I work for (S.C.I.) currently uses Citrix ICA Client, that I am told is your biggest competitor to the Tarantella line. What would you say are the strengths of Tarantella over Citrix, and what you are aiming for in the future to combat Citrix which has the majority of this particular market share? I would love to embrace SCO Tarantella, but not sure how to tell the IT Admin/board members how it is benificial to do so?

Thank you, sir.

++Om

How much life left?

I've noticed a pattern of software companies dropping their SCO offerings while many companies start up a Linux offering. Assuming this pattern continues, how long do you think you can continue to sell a proprietary Unix?

A related question. Will SCO someday offer their own Linux distribution?

Why switch (back) to SCO?

As someone who used to run SCO, and switched to Linux to get a better supported, more featured, and not to mention cheaper product, what are SCO's plans to encourage people like me to switch to SCO?

SCO Skepticism...

Last September, /. featured an article about SCO [slashdot.org] and their view on Linux. The opinions they had about Linux were less than flattering to say the least. I have been thinking about SCO's possible motivations for this recent "change of heart", but I can only conclude that it is from a rapidly decreasing market share. Is it possible that SCO finally realized that Linux isn't for "some punk young kids" as mentioned in this article [computerworld.com]? I am skeptical of this... I'm not anti-SCO, but I was somewhat disheartened to read anyone putting Linux down in such a way. Could someone from SCO fill me in on why you've suddenly made Linux your best friend?

What future software projects will be opensourced?

I've seen a lot of quality software come from Santa Cruz Operation, but until recently it's mostly been proprietary, closed-source software.

Given Linux's shortcommings in system configuration and system backup software in comparison to SCO's high quality implemenatations, what possibility is there that SCO will open the source for it's configurator and backup software? Other software?

Linux does have Linuxconf, but it lacks many features present in commercial unicies like the ability to see the shell command that relates to the current visual configuration command. And the open source backup software offerings for Linux aren't very mature. Well, that's compared to products like Veritas backup exec.

I really was mostly wondering if SCO had software projects that it was planning to open source in the future, what they were, and when, possibly?

How will SCO Survive?

According to the principles of Open Source software development described in The Cathedral and the Bazzar (amongst others), for each "class" of software where there exists signifigant community interest, the Open Source version of the software will at first lag behind its Closed Source counterpart (in terms of features, reliability, etc) but as time progresses, the Open Source software will eventually surpass the Closed Source software.

Once this happens, there's no looking back - the Open Source software has far more developers and debuggers working on the project than even the richest and largest Closed Source software house could ever hope to employ.

If one could somehow graph "quality" of a given software project, one would see that Closed Source software increases linearly, whereas Open Source increases exponentially.

Given that the Linux "quality and features" line is either close to or already across the SCO Unix "quality and features" line, and given that SCO Unix and Linux compete in the same ecological niche, there is really very little reason to put further effort into developing/supporting SCO Unix - Linux has (or is about to) "win" and once "won", SCO Unix will never be able to make up the lost ground.

How then does SCO plan on surviving as a corporate entity when their primary product is outclassed by an Open Source, "free beer" version of the same thing?

(This isn't a borderline troll, I am genuinely curious how SCO intends to survive. They are perhaps the first "major" single-product company to butt heads with a mature Open Source project. How they handle the situation may predict what will happen to other such companies when their single product encounters a similarily mature Open Source version of the same thing - perhaps Adobe (Gimp) in a couple of years?)

What does "Linux" mean?

In the eyes of Caldera, it is a proprietary system with no proprietor, an open closed system with a bottom-up top-down design. (Escher would have been proud!) In the eyes of SGI and IBM, it seems to be a way to showcase their technology and get free bug-fixes in the deal. To Red Hat, it's a means to sell support. To VA Linux, it becomes a means to sell cheaper, faster hardware, especially in the embedded and server markets.

What, then, is Linux to SCO?

customer demand?

Will SCO be contributing / open-sourcing any technology and/or patents that it holds as part of it's linux adoption effort? Also, did your market research pan out - is linux really being used in large businesses or is it still primarily used by small startup companies strapped for cash?

Price/performance?

I have been a long-time user and reseller of SCO products. One of my big concerns is the high cost of SCO Unix for a small installation. Small in this case is a single machine in an office network environment with a few machines networked to the system.

Considering that a good Linux installation is either free or less than $150, will the movement of SCO into the Open Source arena mean that the price of the O/S will drop? How will the new marketplace affect the price of SCO's products?

SCO & Linux: Past vs. Present Opinions

In the past, SCO and its representatives has made a number of statements about Linux (and free software in general) that many of us saw as FUD. In the most infamous example [www.xos.nl], these statements included:

• "Linux at this moment can be considered more a play thing for IT students rather than a serious operating system..."
• "The future of Linux is very uncertain... As there are such a large number of developers it is virtually impossible to predict what form Linux will take thus putting the future security of your business at risk."
• "Currently there are over forty distributions of Linux... and as a result there is no single standard. Potentially, this means that software written for one system will not work on another."

Statements like these damaged SCO's credibility among the community that it now appears to be trying to embrace.

Do you/SCO still stand by these statements and opinions? If not, what changed your mind? Do you still assert that these statements were true when they were being made by SCO representatives --- or, in retrospect, do you admit that it was not accurate, but was just marketing FUD?

Linux as the next SCO Unix?

What does your future roadmap for SCO unix look like? - Are you going the SGI path and gradually phasing out your own Unix in favor of Linux, or are you pursuing a parallel development path of both OSs?

What features currently in SCO that are not in Linux do you feel are necessary for wider corporate acceptance of Linux?

Software

One of the reasons that SCO operating systems have been so popular is that there are a lot of applications (Tetra, Informix etc) that the run on them. These are used very widely (particularly in manufacturing industry in my experience)

As you seem to be embracing open source, will you be encouraging the suppliers of this software to port their applications to open source operating systems?
And how will you sell the idea of open source to the traditionally conservative manufacturing sector?

Monteray and Linux

As most people know, SCO is working with IBM and Sequent (which IIRC IBM bought a while back) to develop a new 64 bit Unix. How will these two OSes work together on your systems? Are you planning on using Linux only on low-end machines, while Monteray runs on IA-64, or while Linux be a "stopgap OS" to run on your systems until Monteray is finished?