SCO to Unix developers, We want you back 427
NoGuffCheck writes "CRN is reporting that Darl McBride is looking to get Unix developers back onboard with cash incentives for completing training in SCO's new mobile application kit; EdgeBuilder. It doesn't stop there; there's a 12-cylinder BMW or $100,000 dollars for the development of the best wireless application."
Re:What a waste (Score:2, Interesting)
They're prepping for the shareholder lawsuit (Score:5, Interesting)
Lost trust (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why their former customers are not going to be future customers, unless they're badly locked in on some 3rd party software. And non-customers will never become customers. Who wants to do business with somebody who'll sue you for moving to a competitor's product? It's like getting divorced from a gold-digger.
Prisoners dilemma (Score:5, Interesting)
Except in theis case it's developers avoiding working for SCO. But the less who do, the better the chances for someone else to get the prize. So there's an incentive to break ranks. Maybe be the one and only developer.
Think of it as a lottery with your integrity against winning a fast car.
MySQL is sponsoring this?! WTF?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmmm... on a completely cough random topic, I think I might switch from MySQL to Postgres.
HP, I could care less about (their computers are cheap, and their calculators are nothing like they used to be), but I thought that MySQL had a decent set of morals. The fact that they could maintain enterprise support while still offering an open-source version is an indication of that. (Although I believe some of the MySQL products are available only to enterprise customers, which is evil.)
Re:Ring Tones? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not surprising at all... SCO is now like VRML, a technology that was always looking for a purpose, rather than technology trying to solve a purpose. It almost reminds you of this company in the year 2k in SF, Istorage I want to say? The original business model was to provide 25MB of FREE storage space that you could access anytime! BY 2002, they had become a design studio or something.
Companies have to keep rolling, so the executives can keep the money and options going.
Re:MySQL is sponsoring this?! WTF?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you saying that MySQL is immoral/evil because they *gasp* charge for some things they invest time and money to develop, or is my sarcasm meter broken?
It would be wise to take advantage of this . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Since there are businesses out there still using SCO's products, there will be a market for professionals specifically trained and qualified to administer those products (even if only long enough to migrate to something else).
I have a few SCO customers.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, even the latest versions of SCO/unix seriously suck. We swapped out a tape drive in one and it took days to get it running and required lots of phone time. Until I started on this project I had forgotten how difficult Linux was in 1993; that's where SCO is now.
Plus no bash shell. No up-arrow command scrolling. Arggh!
Re:Prisoners dilemma (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:MySQL is sponsoring this?! WTF?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm confused by this post. I just have to ask you to clarify...
Are you saying that MySQL is immoral/evil because they *gasp* charge for some things they invest time and money to develop, or is my sarcasm meter broken?
No, I think he means mysql is evil because they are sponsoring SCO's disgusting attempt to buy their way out of the history books and back into mainstream corporate and technology circles. I happen to agree...MySQL is more evil than companies like HP et.al. for the very reason he cited: they are in the free software community, they know the issues, and they certainly cannot be ignorant of how Darl McBride and SCO tried to steal GNU/Linux from its creators (yes, steal, because if McBride et.al. had succeeded in their fraud, the creators of the Linux kernel, and perhaps the wider GNU community, would have been denied the right to legally use their own creations), and they've chosen to sponsor this despite that knowledge. At least a big company like HP may not have followed this (all the SCO bruhaha could be beneath their radar).
I agree that sponsoring an evil knowing its full implications is an act of greater maliciousness than sponsoring an evil in ignorance of its full implications, and MySQL certainly appears to fall in the former category.
It's a pity...I actually like their product. Time to give postgres a gander I suppose.
Re:MySQL is sponsoring this?! WTF?! (Score:2, Interesting)
First, my major point was that any company that sponsors SCO or their activities is evil.
Second, what I was saying is that, given that MySQL's business model involves, for the most part, giving away software and selling support, and given that they've gotten a lot of help from open-source developers, I think it would be better and nicer if they gave away all of their software, and charged for support, just like they do with the MySQL database itself. I would wager that the higher-end enterprise stuff is pretty complex to configure, and most companies would be happy to pay for support instead of wandering around trying to figure it out themselves.
Re:Lost trust (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure there are plenty of less-than-ethical developers who wouldn't scoff at the potential of a BMW (note the article says 10-cyclinder whereas the summary says 12-cylinder) or the $100,000. Developers don't own their work, so the question of stealing work becomes irrelevant. The relevant question is whether an SCO manager will just give the cash prize to his nephew.
To reiterate: developers aren't clients so the trust question doesn't arise, or at least takes a different form.
Re:Sorry SCO (Score:5, Interesting)
You are absolutely right. I worked on SCO systems as a contractor for TACO BELL for a few years programming and maintaining their back of house software used on PC's in the store. They had an effort to create a windows based in-store system, but that has been abandoned. Now, they are porting their back of house applications to SUSE Linux with a view to getting off of SCO systems as soon as they can. The same is true, I believe for their fellow Yum brands company, Pizza Hut.
This latest move by SCO is desperation -- trying to find some new market in which to stay alive while their bread and butter UnixWare and OpenServer business withers and dies. SCO is going down.
Mysql + SCO???? WTF (Score:3, Interesting)
This is disgusting.
Mysql AB should be ashamed of themselves for this blatant support of an OSS attacker.
Postgresql
+better ANSI compliance
+ACID
+not a toy database
+doesn't support SCO finances
Make your move today!
Biztones... (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course we had fun with it. We made up our own messages such as "lunchtime", "time to go home". He was such a PHB. I'm sure other PHBes would like biztones as well.
Re:MySQL is sponsoring this?! WTF?! (Score:1, Interesting)
iirc, it was SCO who paid mysql money for them to support SCO users, not the other way around.
I'm stuck with OpenServer (Score:4, Interesting)
I maintain an OpenServer box for work only because of a legacy app that requires it. Well, strictly, the app requires Microsoft Xenix to run - it's from 1983 (!!) - but SCO OpenServer's XENIX kernel personality does the trick with a few quirks. OpenServer at least supports PCI, >16MB RAM, and >512MB disks, unlike XENIX. (OpenServer 5.0.5 actually supports up to 2TB disks/arrays, >137GB ATA disks, etc. Not bad for an OS from 1995). If it weren't for that need - which Linux can't satisfy even with the defunct ibcs project - I'd be rid of OpenServer in an instant. Linux 2.6 isn't as stable as I'd like, but that's worth it
I can't imagine anybody buying OpenServer now. Its only purpose is legacy support. Unixware doesn't even have that. Before Sun released Solaris for free, they had a tiny sliver of hope from people who need more stability than Linux provides
Even if their technology wasn't obsolete crap, who on earth would buy from a company that sues its own customers? Oh, wait, I use Microsoft software at work and I'm well aware of its involvement in the BSA & BSAA so that's no argument at all... but the obsolete crap point holds.
Re:MySQL is sponsoring this?! WTF?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it was an end-user printer. So? I rate a company based first on my experiences with it, then on reports from other people. That inevitably means that if their consumer products are shoddy, I will consider the company a manufacturer of shoddy goods. And HP isn't quite there...the printer is cheap, but not shoddy. Their technical support, however, is shoddy.
I don't expect the kind of quality from a commercial product that I expect from a professional level product, but if a company cheats one set of users, then the company is a cheat and cannot be trusted with a more expensive purchase. It's true that some companies beleive in only cheating the mass-market customers...or at least that there are voices that proclaim so. (But voices are cheap, and astroturfing has been with us for a long time, and I don't know WHO wrote the post I'm replying to.)
OTOH, HP *used* to make quality merchandise. When it did so, it advertised the fact. I still remember their ad about the HP-51 (I think it was) calculator that fell off the hood of a jeep in Alaska, and was buried in the road all winter, chewed up by a snow-plow the next summer, and still worked. Been a long time since I've seen one of those ads.
I remember the disk drive company (not HP) back when auto-parking heads first came out that noted at the show that the drive they were running from had fallen down two flights of stairs onto a concrete loading deck while they were unpacking the exhibit. (Well, that's not remarkable anymore, but at the time it was startling.)
Computers have, in general, become more durable. HP seems to have been defying the trend. Perhaps their very expensive models are better...but I prefer to get to know a company through inexpensive purchases. If they work out, then I move them up the purchase pyramid. I rarely buy something expensive from a company as my first deal with them. HP has been moving DOWN the pyramid. They used to be near the top. Now
Re:Mysql + SCO???? WTF (Score:2, Interesting)
Is there anything that actually shows Mysql is supporting SCO? Or is SCO just using their product the same way it's using Apache and perl and PHP?
Kind of ironic that they call themselves a 'SCAMP' stack...
Re:What a waste (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice name there! I thought you were making that up, but they actually named their product SCAMP. Here it is, straight from my dictionary:
scamp 1 |skamp| noun informal a person, esp. a child, who is mischievous in a likable or amusing way. a wicked or worthless person; a rogue. DERIVATIVES scampish adjective ORIGIN mid 18th cent.(denoting a highwayman): from obsolete scamp [rob on the highway,] probably from Middle Dutch schampen 'slip away,' from Old French eschamper 'flee the battlefield,' from champ 'field.'
Wow! Amazing marketing there... sign up today for SCO's highway robbery!
Re:I'm stuck with OpenServer (Score:3, Interesting)
I've just finished moving a company from a similar thing. It required some modifications to x286emul, but it runs flawlessly (and *much* faster) on Linux than on OpenSewer.
Re:This is Darl's "Cover my ass" strategy (Score:4, Interesting)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=5y&l=off&z
You'd /hope/ so! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you act automatically, send in your CV, stay within "course boundaries" etcetera, it can be amazing what you miss!
Re:Ah, but there's a catch... (Score:3, Interesting)
Aye, there's the rub!
there are a lot of developers out there who don't know about this stuff.
See, if they were finding it easy to hire coders of the required standard, then they'd hardly need to pull a stunt like this one in order to attract talent. And if they are having problems todays job market where there are still coders unemployed from the dot bomb crash, then I suspect word must have pretty much permeated the *nix community.
Unless of course the whole thing is purely a scam to bilk developers out of their fees. That I might believe.
Personally I think I'm tending toward Option C: "Both of the above"
Re:Anything good about UnixWare or Sco-Me? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll do what I can to the best of my ability. One of my clients has an OpenServer box, but it is very old and even predates the buyout of SCO UNIX by Caldera. Therefor most of my knowledge is rather dated and may not apply to what is current.
OpenServer is a joke compared to modern UNIX and UNIX work-a-likes such as Linux or the BSDs. Clients I've known who have had OpenServer have invariably migrated away from it with one exception, and they will likely do so soon. Those people who are still using OpenServer are doing so not because they necessarily choose it, but because they chose some proprietary application for their business that was created to run on SCO OpenServer during it's hayday.
For example, my client has been using OpenServer for probably close to ten years. They purchased it as part of a software package to handle certain needs. The company that produced this software is still in business, but no longer supports OpenServer. This has created a need for my client to migrate away from OpenServer, though perhaps not from the specific software. Naturally they will be involving us in their evaluation of a new software suite to handle their needs, and OpenServer will be immediately shot down. Even had The SCO Group never sued Linux users (we actually got one of their cease-and-desist letters) we would not consider them for the following primary reasons:
The last is a bit of a misnomer. I'm almost 100% certain that OpenServer will cease to be developed at all within the next two years and will probably be abandonware Real Soon Now. Even if there was only say a 20% chance that SCO will loose it all, why would anyone bet their hard-earned cash on something with those odds when other products are equally fit for the task and don't have one foot in the grave?
Probably because their middle-ware is really vaporware. I mean come on! Custom ring-tones? Even if the ring-tone business is as big as they claim to be, I have a hard time believing corporations will be interested in "biztones". IMHO, custom ring tones are popular only to teenagers and people in their early twenties. These people are not business managers and probably aren't involved in business beyond starting the timer on the fry cooker. Moreover, The SCO Group doesn't have any established means of targetting this crowd. The SCO Group has always been a business-to-business corporation, not a business-to-consumer corporation. This entire move reeks of a company attempting to convince others that they are innovating and breaking into a whole new market with a new killer product. Of course, they don't have the means to do this, so even if it is feasible for some one to do, it isn't going to be The SCO Group that accomplishes it. Other businesses know this, so SCO tacked on the whole "we're courting UNIX developers with huge prizes including a new BMW and/or $100,000".
Re:Sorry SCO (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory article nitpicks... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure if McBride quit right now, he could find some job that someone would take him for, somewhere. It might be McDonalds, but it would be a living.
As it is, well, you said it, they will undoubtably be torn apart. All this tells me is that like Enron, the execs who made all the fuckups will get off with a warning and a pile of cash, and the hard-working people who never liked the company in the first place will get the shaft.
Which means, he may ultimately win, but I doubt if he can sleep at night.
Which reminds me -- one of the benefits of a small business is that you know everyone, from the smallest file clerk to the owner of the company. It means you have a much more personal motivation to make the company succeed, or to go down with the ship. It's a lot easier to jump ship with a large severance package if you only really know other people who can do the same... and the US government supports Big Business.
It's too late for conspiracy theories, though, I'll need my sanity tomorrow. Draw your own conclusions, Slashdot.