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Caldera

Caldera Close To Buying SCO Unix 106

Posted by CmdrTaco from the and-three-people-care dept.
So much happened yesterday that this story sorta slipped through the cracks: Is Caldera Buying SCO? I don't know which company I consider less relevant (Don't flame me! I simply don't know anyone who runs either SCO or Caldera! No that isn't an invitation for both of you to e-mail me and complain!) but it is a pretty strange pairing.
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Caldera Close To Buying SCO Unix More

Caldera Close To Buying SCO Unix

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  • > god knows linux needs a bit more order and discipline.

    My gods respectfully disagree with yours.

    --

  • Re:Caldera vs. SCO (Score:3)

    by Tiro ( 19535 ) on Thursday July 20, 2000 @03:17AM (#918961) Journal
    Right on. We all remember when the SCO CEO declared Linux irrelevent, then came back with a Linux strategy for his own company only a few months later.

    He's such a moron :]

  • Donno what is the status now about that domain name, but Collab.net announced that they will buy it from Caldera.
  • I would wonder if Red Hat in going throw it's hat in the arena. If a linux vendor does get it al I hope is they use it for the good of the community
  • Thanks for pointint this out. Caldera has done TONS for Linux. Graphical installers came about because Caldera had it (Text is fine by me, but mom want's pretty pictures and progress bars). If more people use Linux because of it, that's great because the more people who use it, the better device support we'll get (hello ALPS can you make something available so we can make your printers work in Linux??). Caldear picking up SCO is a good move, as long as it doesn't sink Caldera.

  • Amen. About 92-93 timeframe, I was still in school, and the CS department was getting tired of the donated AT&T 3B2's they were using. Someone decided to buy three new Pentium I machines, with SCO. As you said, no C compiler...which pretty much made those new machines useless to a bunch of CS majors. Those machines ran Slackware as soon as we got our hands on it...

    The coolest part was when a professor needed FORTRAN for a research project, and was having trouble getting time on a mainframe. Turned out GNU Fortran was on the Slackware distro, and he was able to complete his project on one of our Linux boxes. (He didn't need speed, he just needed FORTRAN.)

    SCO reminds me of Microsoft...lots of money for the OS, then lots more money for development tools so you can actually build stuff. Then even more money for documentation and licensing. Blech.

    (I know, I'm preaching to the choir...but SCO's lack of included tools is what got me into Linux in the first place.)

  • Of course we know that this rumor is true, because Apple was bought by Disney last week, on the same day that Sun merged with Oracle.
  • You know, that may be one of the worst logos (the caldera one) I have ever seen. It only now dawned on me that it was a red "c" in a blue globe.

    I had always seen it as a blue mickey-mouse ear on a red globe. This is probably why I have had such a hard time taking them seriously -- I've been getting submliminal messages of "Disney Linux" every time I see it.
  • I consider myself corrected. Perhaps Caldera needs to raise it's community profile a bit. Somehow I hear of other distributers contributions but not the ones you have stated above.

    Regards
  • I don't know which company I consider less relevant (Don't flame me! I simply don't know anyone who runs either SCO or Caldera! No that isn't an invitation for both of you to e-mail me and complain!)

    CmdrTaco has become what he despises: a troll


  • Re:SCO (Score:2)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    And for all those reasons you outline above, I really smiled when I saw that SCO was having trouble.

    I know it's not nice, but I felt a deep sense of justice. The company that wouldn't sell an inexpensive copy of Unix to a poor college student is having trouble - boo hoo.

    On the other hand, I was genuinely sad when Mark Williams Corp. went out of business.

  • Hm (Score:2)

    by jbarnett ( 127033 )

    I wonder if all the Caldera people will release all SCO code under GPL or keep it under their (SCO's) current restrictive license.

  • Other distros are catching up, but Caldera's install and GUI admin tools (eg COAS) make it a much better system for folks who just want to use it to get work done rather than geeks that like to tweak.

    I ran it (Open Linux 2.1 and 2.2) for a while (I've since been a pretty steady SuSE user) and I've installed it and recommended it at/to a number of places with little 'nix expertise instead of NT machines for miscellaneous server duties. (Eg my daughter's school, a small mostly-Windows business, various individuals.)
    Come to think of it, my personal 'net server (ajwm.net and a couple of other domains) is running Caldera (on a 486!) since I never saw any need to change it. (I use SuSE for development.)

    Mind, lately Caldera seems to be targetting less the individual user and more businesses (so the SCO deal may make some sense.)
  • This make perfect sense for Caldera. Before Corel came in, they were the ones in the US market pushing their release of Linux as business-oriented. By buying SCO, they can
    a) call their release of Linux UNIX (which
    might, of course, slide over to cover
    every release);
    b) gain a *large* customer base (for example,
    I happen to know Walgreen's uses SCO), and
    c) would let the SCO folks migrate to Linux,
    which might be what's happening, anyway,
    esp. since SCO has announced support for
    Linux, but might make it easier, and gain
    more upper mgmt support.

    Think, 20 years ago, of IBM and DEC.

    mark
  • Compile what? What is not in eDesktop that you can't get at ftp://ftp.calderasystems.com/pub/contrib/RPMS/libc 6/ in binary RPM form.

    If you don't have anything to say...

  • I can imagine that someone who was red/green colorblind (which can sometimes affect blue as well) the logo would look just like a sphere with a weird white line thru it. Hm.
  • I tried to do a network install of Caldera on a POS terminal. No CD-ROM reader. I couldn't get it to work. Sucked down a redhat CD-ROM, did a network install, and it's running fine. Now if I could only get the LCD to run at 800x600, and figure out why /dev/ttyS4 is returning EOF, AND decode the touch panel's serial output, I'd be all set to run X.
    -russ
    p.s. It's Javelin's Wedge P.
  • RedHat has the tools you need to get the job done most of the time, but there doesn't seem to be much thought put into it. Caldera seems to take a step back and say "how can we put all this together into an elegant solution?" For example, on RedHat, config tools are scattered all over the place and many of them are the old familiar (read that as primitive and crappy) like sndconfig and XF86Config. So you'll hunt around for these diverse tools, to get things configured. Sure you've got linuxconf, but not it doesn't include everything. I might add that linuxconf is a textbook case of bad user interface design. I don't think any thought was put into it at all. Caldera, on the other hand, has managed to get nearly ever major config task integrated into COAS, an easy-to-use and relatively complete admin tool. It's worth mentioning that Mandrake has a similar tool. It's not as far along, but it has promise. So Mandake built an advanced installer and config tool on top of RedHat. Why can't RedHat do that?
  • Gnome-libs are included. Every distro has to have GIMP!

    I think it was RedHat who obscured the filesystem. Caldera actually includes a "redhat compatibility package" that installs symlinks in all the right (wrong) places -- an unfortunate necessity in a RedHat world. The others are all farely similar. The problem with RedHat is what they do becomes the de facto standard (a bit like Microsoft in that respect).
  • Ah, the Register story isn't a denial. I'm not honestly sure what I'd call it, but there's no denial here.

    As for Noorda in all this, consider that Noorda was fighting Microsoft before Linux was twinkle in Linus' eye... Think about it.

    Steven, Editor at Large, Sm@rt Partner

  • Linux may become a UNIX (Score:3)

    by Grimwiz ( 28623 ) on Thursday July 20, 2000 @03:19AM (#918980) Homepage
    Hmmm, I seem to remember that SCO is the owner of the UNIX trademark.

    Linux has up to now been called unix-ish because designing something to be POSIX compatible makes a system behave very unixy anyway. However the real UNIX trademark is based on money, not just compatibility. Maybe the Caldera move will actually enable us to call it UNIX, in the same way that Solaris, AIX and HPUX are all UNIX.

    also...

    SCO also owns a lot of intellectual property which whilst a lot of it has been re-engineered as open source there are a few things that would give Caldera an edge.
  • Like you're really going to get customers by insulting them. I have never seen anything so IDIOTIC in my entire life ... and I've known a lot of idiots in my time.

    Expect problems like you've never dreamt of.
  • I've not been particularly impressed with either company and rather hope that they both die off to completely eliminate the chance of me having to deal with some client who's stuck on using their products in the future. Of course, my hatred of SCO has a much more personal note as I've actually had to deal with them in the past. They're not a pleasant company to deal with, from their confusing price schemes to their ineffective technical support. While I really couldn't care less one way or another about Caldera, I'll be dancing on SCO's grave.
  • "some of SCO's standards" ? Can you name some.
    TW: SCO OpenServer 5.05 is noticably slower in I/O than Linux on same hw.
  • But of course /. would be a waste of typing... :)
  • I would prefer nearly any other Linux distributer to be buying SCO. Caldera seem to give back little to the Linux community. On the other hand, perhaps this is Caldera's chance to prove that they too can contribute if they are prepared to incorporate UnixWare technology into Linux, assuming they can.

    Shame to see SCO go though, I still have a copy of Santa Cruz Xenix on 5 1/4" disk with manuals!

    Regards
  • I installed Caldera (I think was 2.3) once. It looks cute with the GUI installer (when RH at the time don't).

    But after using once, I don't think I'll use it again. Don't flame me... I still find Slackware /is/ the best distro!

  • Plenty of solid reasons. (Score:5)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Thursday July 20, 2000 @03:59AM (#918987)
    For one thing, SCO has Tarantella, a nifty multi-OS graphical-terminal-server technology similar to Citrix's MetaFrame. For another thing, SCO's Unix has some nice innards that would be nice to get hold of, although as others have noted, some of those pieces may end up being sold off separately to a company like Sun.

    But more importantly, probably, SCO has an estblished professional sales force and field offices, and a Rolodex full of current paying customers at medium-to-large companies that have both server and desktop deployments of Unix on x86 hardware. Caldera's desktop and server Linux distros target SCO's traditional markets directly, more so than any other Linux distro, and they're probably looking to set up more field sales offices and build up their sales force.

    Sounds like a sensible move to me.
  • UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group!

    you can read it here: http://www.unix-systems.org/trademark.html [unix-systems.org]
  • What is wrong with running normal X servers in a framebuffer enabled kernel? I'm running 1 right now with a ATI card!

    Anyway, I think for someone who cannot get use to a particular distro, just go and try another.

    You may not know, there maybe some hard head Caldera user who will burn you for this... *joke*
  • Ray Noorda is a big backer of Caldera and already owned the Unix source code back when he was driving Novell into the ground. I guess he just misses the code and wants it back.

    SCO owns the SVR4 Unix source code but not the trademark. That is owned by X/Open-The Open Group, whatever they call themselves today.
  • Yes, I was a little surprised the first time I heard that myself. But the UNIX trademark is now owned by OpenGroup, and any OS that passes the UNIX certification tests (API compatibilities, required utilities, etc.) is qualified to brand itself a UNIX. OS/390 qualified a year or so back. (And it's probably the only UNIX around that uses EBCDIC (or for that matter anything but ASCII) as its native character set.

    (Most Linux distros almost qualify, the main problems being some slight differences in GNU utilities vs the UNIX flavor -- plus the fact that it costs money to go through the cert process.)

    Mostly it means that any portably-written UNIX program will build and run on any such OS.
  • Gnome libs are located here [calderasystems.com] along with lots of other goodies. It's called do one thing and do it well. Maybe RH should take a lesson from Caldera.

    Standards? There are two standards LSB & 'The Red Hat way'. If the community should be supporting anyone it should be Caldera.

  • when you have to explain your joke in more lines than the actual joke itself, chances are that people won't find it funny.

    :-)
  • I submitted this story right after it hit ZDnet...and got rejected. Oh, well.
    --
  • You're very right. Every time someone posts an opinion, it is (and should be) an invitation for anyone who disagrees to state their own contrasting opinion. By stating that he does not want to be flamed for his opinion, it seems to me that he doesn't want to have his time wasted by people who don't agree with him. I understand that his job at /. involves recieving an avalanche of e-mail every day and it probably gets overwhelming and very frustrating, but as with every branch of the media, if you make your opinion public, you should expect the public to have something to say about your opinion.
  • Well of course it is. You now have to go sit in the corner for the rest of the day nursing that little hole in your lip while contemplating the parameters of subtlety in humor.
  • This isn't completely accurate, SCO bought parts of what is now called UnixWare from Novell. And Novell simply attained liscense to release portions of the AT&T Unix kernel.

    This possibility makes a lot more sense than people realize. Caldera has always had close ties to Novell/NetWare (via Ray Noorda as you said). Caldera has been developing Unix/NetWare inter-communication protocols and porting NetWare tools to Linux for a while now. (ie. IPX etc) What Caldera would get out of the deal is mainly a large (and loyal) customer base. (I happen to work for a company with over 150 mobile SCO Servers.)

    This could be a very important move for Caldera and the entire Linux community. It would bring another Linux vendor into the corporate lime-light. And give a lot of the old SCO die-hards a much smoother migration path. As pretty much everyone agrees, SCO Unix is dying a sure death. And what most people don't realize, is that they used to be THE ONLY x86 Unix vendor. They have a huge installed base, in many areas that you'd never expect.

    "Like water, from a vine-leaf."
    * shadoi

  • EMC does not run SCO on thier products (at least not the stuff they designed - Symmetrix). They may "support" it (last I heard they did not).

    The Symmetrix software (that runs *ON* the Symmetrix) was written in-house in assembly (roumoured recently to be in C) and is not a general purpose OS (like SCO).

    Furthermore... Just comparing EMC reliability / engineering to SCO is misleading. SCO is not in the same ballpark as EMC.
  • I consider myself corrected.

    What? A /.'er admitting to being corrected?!

    Must be solar flares...

  • hmmm (Score:1)

    by Da_Monk ( 88392 )
    this could definately change caldera's goals, and modus operandi....

    personally i'd like to see some of SCO's standards get incorporated into linux. god knows linux needs a bit more order and discipline.

  • if you are copying something from one directroy to another like cp .profile /root/. i don't know what it means just how to use it :)

  • Caldera vs. SCO (Score:3)

    by Dr. Sp0ng ( 24354 ) <mspong.gmail@com> on Thursday July 20, 2000 @03:00AM (#919002) Homepage
    I know a few people who run Caldera, and I have about as much respect for SCO as the typical Slashdot reader (i.e. none) but I think that SCO is (or rather, was) a much more relevant company than Caldera. Before Linux/*BSD hit the mainstream (for the backend, I mean, not the desktop) SCO was the forerunner in x86 UNIX.

    'course, I'm not sorry to see them go. They're a bunch of assholes.
    --

  • Microsoft Smokescreen (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Microsoft has already been in closed door negotiations with sco - the release of Windows due sometime in 2003 will have sco/linux undertones with a seperate GUI (Windows) Of course, it will all _BE_ GUI, but a fullscreen command prompt that pops up when you log in will make it seem like you're running a real os.
  • hopefully this will bring in the strenght and stability of SCO's product with the usablity and great install gui of caldera's product...this could be a good thing. With the swing in tech ipo's I predict you will see more and more of this type of merger/acquisition.
  • I tend to agree with the above comment that the most important asset of SCO is probably its large and loyal base of VAR's (Value-added-resellers) and ISV's (Independent-software-vendors). These are regionally-based solution providers who generally have intimate relationships with their customers to provide complete focused solutions (hardware, off-the-shelf + custom software, training, support, upgrades) --- be it medical, legal, industrial, or other custom applications. The customers might not even realize that it's SCO UNIX running underneath their solution (maybe Caldera Linux in the future?), all they want is the solution and the VAR/ISV support.

    Therefore, this VAR/ISV sales-force will be able to push the Linux solution of whomever acquires SCO.
  • What would Caldera do with SCO? Keep it UnixWare separate product like Sun did with StarOffice? Or merge it completely with varying success, like Apple/NeXT?

    Another question: if it was kept separate, you think Caldera would open-source it? IMHO Caldera is not the biggest open-source advocate (using the famous iso-image redistribution method; NOT EVERYONE HAS A CDR! and yes, I know losetup) but would UnixWare end up being open-sourced? (I doubt free)

    This would also be a good chance, if it was open-sourced, to see how the sales did as a result; would the consumers flee from the release of technology, or not care? A good test to see how the public reacts to open-source, I think.
  • Its a play on words. A hard URL to pronounce...

    aich tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot org

    jrw

  • In the article it mentioned the possibility that SCO's Tarentella (application) division might get bought by Sun. This is interesting considering that one domain mentioned in association with Sun's Open Sourcing of Star Office, openoffice.org, is in fact owned by Caldera!

  • Well, if you think that once Caldera buys SCO's OpenServer 5 and Unixware 7 and open the sources - then you'll need to think again - many parts of the OS are copyrights by third parties, which means - they cannot release their sources (at least part of them)..

    Also, Caldera are not going to buy the entire SCO - the Tarantella part will be spinned of to a whole new company (probably owned by SCO & Caldera)..

    SCO biggest advantage is their ISV's and VAR's - they got tons of registered VAR's and ISV's - which Caldera can use to sell their eServer. Remember - the way RedHat works is totally different then Caldera, and Caldera is much more oriented to the suits then RedHat (IMHO of course).

    If I'm not mistaken - the latest SCO Unix has many improvments over Linux (failsafe, SMP, and some other parts - I don't remember which ones right now).

    Isn't it ironic that 12 months ago SCO called Linux "a toy OS" and now they're going to be sold to a big Linux distributor? :-)

    You may also want to look at a story here [theregister.co.uk] from the register, which gives more details about the deal

    btw: officially - both companies still deny everything..

  • > Maybe the Caldera move will actually enable us to call it UNIX, in the same way that Solaris, AIX and HPUX are all UNIX.

    Maybe so, though I don't think it matters very much.

    Honestly, I suspect that in five years any remaining Unices will be described in the media as being "Linux compatible" or "Linux-like", rather than the other way around.

    --
  • It's not so much that he thinks it's illogical (as much as I could garner from his commentary anyways) but that it's totally inconsequential... I mean, what changes *ARE* going to come out of this?

  • Re:What does SCO have to offer (Score:3)

    by EnderWiggnz ( 39214 ) on Thursday July 20, 2000 @03:27AM (#919012)
    All SCO brings to the table is their name and trust relationship with suits. Some places absolutely will not run Linux on their x86 boxes, and instead insist on using SCO, despite their insane pricing scheme, and shaky stability.

    SO what caldera gets here is the ability to sell to more "conservative" companies... you know, the ones that actually believe that they need to be able to sue a company with a REAL OS, like SCO...

  • EMC runs SCO on their emc raids, which aren't exactly unknown nothings..Caldera is kind of scary tho, their ideas about how linux should be..they're pretty much outsiders in the linux community, riding on the coat tails of what gnu/linux yet grapsing none of the concepts. http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/19/0837205.shtm l etc etc..just visit their site:P there are enough good distro's, without something like that riding on already established work..something about .rpm brings out commercialism:)
  • Personally I'd rather Linux didn't have Unix branding. I don't want Linux to become just another flavour of Unix, it's doing very well on it's own thankyou.
  • I myself owe alot to SCO. There certification, well I havent done the exam yet.. : ) probably a bit late know. Got me my job.. When I left school about a year ago it was SCO MACE , MCSE or Solaris that could offer my some kind of Networking certification. Solaris was too expensive and half of South Africa are MCSE's.
  • Installed user base. Radio Shack for one has SCO OpenServer running their servers in each store. Of course that replaced a Tandy 1000 running some custom OS just a few years ago.
  • I posted the following background on the Monterey Alliance when SCO had announced it was for sale when I too asked of its fate; but I'll repost here for the sake of my answer.
    Monterey [ibm.com], as you may or may not know, is the recently formed alliance between several Unix distributors, who having faced the prospect of rewriting their operating systems for the 64-bit Itanium processor decided to pool their resources. Monterey was to have been a combination of IBM's AIX, Sequent's Dynix and SCO's Unixware with technical support from other companies such as Compaq and would run on the IA-64 and PowerPC chips (support for AMD's 64-bit chips have yet to be announced).

    Monterey was to have a signified a shot in the arm for Unix vendors who are being beset by not only the growing market share of Linux and Windows NT. Industry momentum is building and commitment is growing for Monterey on IA-64, which will be "a leading, high volume, channel-ready, shrink-wrapped, UNIX operating system" as trumpeted by its developers."

    Apparently, IBM had bought out Sequent in recent times and on the day that SCO went up for sale rumours went around that IBM would buy out SCO as well, but surprise, Caldera has beat IBM to it. IBM?s original strategy on the Unix/Linux front was always that it would continue supporting Linux as a choice for low to mid end servers, while supporting the Monterey project to develop a Unix distribution for its high end servers and for clients want a "supported" OS. I guess that Monterey is also IBM's attempt to retain costs that would otherwise by cannibalised by Linux.

    Caldera, being a Linux distributor would also follow this same strategy as SCO's current contributions to the Monterey are to valuable at the moment to ignore and left out to rot; and now seeing that one of the aims of Monterey is to provide Linux emulation/binary support(?), as well as a native Linux IA32/PPC code tree, Caldera would surely capitalise on their expertise and experience and would surely be a worthy addition to the alliance in there own right.

  • Does Walt Disney Co. legal know about this?
    <O
    ( \
  • OREM, UT and SANTA CRUZ, CA--July 18, 2000--Caldera Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CALD), and Tarantella, Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOC), today announced the first bundling of Tarantella Web-enabling software in the Linux space. This solution, Caldera OpenLinux Application Server with Tarantella, provides centralized management and deployment of applications on a fast, stable and low-cost platform simplifying IT responsibilities while reducing business costs. http://ir.calderasystems.com/wc/form/P1?template=i r/CALD/press_releases
  • The UNIX trademark is owned by the OpenGroup.
  • >Hmmm, I seem to remember that SCO is the owner
    >of the UNIX trademark.

    Nope, they transfered the trademark to the Open Group back in like 1995.

    What they do own is the System V codebase.
  • Why does wanting to not be flamed equate to not wanting anybody to disagree with him? Those are two completely different things. Seems like he just doesn't feel like dealing with people saying things like, "SCO RULEZ, YOU MORON!" Disagreeing with his opinion in a rational manner, with actual points to back up your counter opinion doesn't exactly count as flaming...

  • Unices will be described in the media as being "Linux compatible" or "Linux-like", rather than the other way around.

    Much like some people still refer to Wintels as IBMs. (even though there are more IBM components in an Apple these days than in most Wintels).

  • Another question: if it [UNIXWARE] was kept separate, you think Caldera would open-source it?

    I could be wrong, but I think it would be pretty unfeasible to open source Unixware. I imagine that there is a horrendous amount of license and patent encumbered code in the product.

    On the other hand, Tarantulla on Linux could ver well be a WTS killer.

  • I run both. Open Server 5 is the only 'real' unix that supports my SCSI card. I also use UnixWare 7. I think my favourite thing about SCO is the SCOAdmin tool (written in Visual TCL).

    While Caldera isn't my favourite distribution, it is acceptable for a workstation.

    FunkyDemon
  • Speaking of Caldera's goals, how would purchasing SCO fit in with their main objective, which is to serve as a robust lawsuit generating platform for the angry old man (Noorda)? Is there some new angle by which grumpy old Ray can sue because of Xenix originating at Microsoft or something?

    Open Linux is only the 'front' product at Calera. Spite is their primary product.
  • I used to run Caldera OpenLinux ... honestly I think its a piece of garbage. It doesn't ship with the all the necessary libraries, and getting them compiled is a nightmare...

    I know a guy who runs a small ISP/ASP, and he's got RedHat 6.1 on one machine, SCO on the other...he got cracked, but guess it what? It wasn't on the SCO machine, it was on the Red Hat box. The skr1pt k1ddi3 couldn't exploit the SCO box, probably because SCO sucks so bad he couldn't get a HOWTO for cracking the damn thing.... hehehe...

    SCO's really not that bad, but I like Linux and FreeBSD...

  • Even though I consider their products to have fallen behind the curve, there are still a huge number of installed SCO systems out there. I've worked for several different companies, and between them all, I've probably seen close to a thousand installed SCO systems. Until recently, if you wanted a low cost Unix system, SCO was the way to go. Lots of vendors use SCO boxes as controllers to their hardware. EIS for example uses SCO boxes to drive their predictive dialers. For a long time, the only Unix drivers for Dialogic were for SCO. (Don't know if even now if Linux drivers are available) If you wanted to do telephony with products like Dialogic, and you wanted to run under Unix, SCO was probably going to be the way you were going to go. You probably won't see too many high end servers running SCO anymore, but where you do see SCO, you'll probably see a lot of boxes. I worked at West Interactive for a couple of years, and they have hundreds of VRU's taking calls that are all running SCO, and although I think that it is a fading technology, there are still so many boxes out there running SCO, that anything that happens to SCO is going to affect a lot of people out there.
  • Well, as much as I think you are probably trolling....
    That would be the best news ever... I mean, the TWO real UNIX back together, BSD, and sysV

    Wow
    Together with the Ongoing Code Merge of FreeBSD +BSDI + (Maybe SCO UNIX Sys V ).... Damn...
    It brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it ;)

    FreeBSD... the Choice of those who know how to choose....
  • > Like you're really going to get customers by
    > insulting them

    The sales of the "...for dummies" and similar
    books would disagree with you, I feel...
  • Say it isn't so!

    Please, oh please, tell me that that database telling people that I've bought countless audio connectors other mediocre electronic components isn't vulnerable to the legions of SCO crackers!!!

    I told all my friends I only buy Switchcraft connectors!!! Now word will get out!!!

  • It's not just the money to go through the certification process.

    The process involves certifying binaries as compliant. The next patch scarfed from Usenet to fix the security-hole-of-the-week in library xxx decertifies the whole thing again and requires retesting of the new version.

    Linux is far too ad-hoc to ever become formally certified. If Red hat had poured the money into such a process, we could probably say that by now Red Hat 4.3 would be POSIX compliant, by the books.

    There's a 'hold still, damnit!' requirement that Linux, the friskly little puppy of OSes, will never be able to meet.
  • no, but a red swirl kicks ass


  • I am going anonymous to ask this off topic question. In Unix/Linux world what is /.? I know what ./ is current directory. I'm sorry but I have been wondering awhile.

    I'm assuming you're not a troll.

    /. is the root directory.
    /. is also 'l333t shorthand for slashdot

    George
  • Yeah what high standards from SCO? Their superior security? Their fantastic hardware support? Their excellent scoadmin software? Their patches which fix problems introduced by previous patches which have nothing to do with the problem they created?

    I have to admin around 80 of the beasts on hardware ranging from PC style hardware to beastly servers, SCO has a serious lack of quality when compared to a serious Linux distribution like release versions of Debian. The only thing that is sort of nice is scoadmin, but only for beginners, once you want to do anything slightly better than add a user you need to know your low level Unix. It has some major problems with keeping system integrity anyway, so I'd advise against even newbies using it.

  • Re:im sorry but i have a question. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    . is the current directory. / is the root directory. Therefore /. is the current directory of the root directory, ie. the root directory.

    cp blah /
    and
    cp blah /.
    do exactly the same thing.
  • That frisky little puppy needs a diet.
  • I just tried to install this on a 386 with 4 megs of RAM. It wouldn't work! Then I installed Tiny Linux and it worked fine! Caldera sucks!
    >>>>>>>
    To tell the truth, you're personal experience has very little bearing on the suckiness rating of anything.
  • That's BULLSHIT
  • I'd like to hear from someone who has used SCO recently: What does SCO have that Linux is missing? And what does SCO do better than Linux?

    Because if Caldera gets ahold of it, it will inevitably be open-sourced and integrated into Linux-at-large. And good on Caldera for integrating it into their distro first.

    --

  • I have used both the newest version 2.4 desktop and 2.2. 2.2 had problems where expect and the latest version of java wouldn't work. I haven't seen a lot of problems with 2.4 except there is no pluggable module for openssl into webmin. Not to mention that my manager was pretty impressed with it too. I have to admit I haven't run redhat since 5.2 and mandrake since 6.something and didn't like any of them then. I think caldera for an rpm based distro is pretty good. If I had a faster connection I would of just stayed with debian.

  • SCO (Score:5)

    by ahappli ( 175582 ) on Thursday July 20, 2000 @03:09AM (#919042) Homepage
    SCO back in the late 80's early 90's was one of the leaders in x86 Unix versions. Unfortunatly they also had a habit of selling each individual piece that they thought they could. For example, if you wanted TCP/IP, you had to buy it seperatly, if you wanted to compile something on SCO you had to buy the compiler seperatly. If you wanted to just about anything you had to buy the component. Thier searchable Web Help was very nice when I found it around 1994 or 95. But a full SCO system, just the OS would run a couple of thousand dollars. The hardware was cheap, but the OS was expensive. Linux has pretty much taken over everything that SCO was good at, and does better at some things that SCO could.
  • Well, they might have owned it in the past, but openoffice.org seems to be owned buy Sun at this point, but its nameservers do point to caldera's name servers....

  • Well, whatever. All he's doing is wasting somebody's mod points to snuff him out. I'm going to call the cops, and see what happens.
  • Looking out ahead, the real question I want answered is, does Caldera get a stake in the Monterey Project? This could be very interesting to see how Monterey might change in development with Caldera in the game. While not known for being the most Open Source friendly, they could really change there image by putting the portions of SCO they can under the GPL, and if they worked with IBM to do something similar with Monterey, interesting things could come to the world of Open Source.

  • Re:Caldera and SCO (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20, 2000 @03:36AM (#919046)
    Let's see... Caldera has provided the following:

    o Dynamic channel allocation for PPP in the Linux kernel

    o A large chunk of Linux's IPX support

    o 100% of Linux's SPX support

    o Commercial viability (they brought companies like WordPerfect and Sun to Linux)

    o Netscape, which was about to drop Linux as a supported platform (like they dropped FreeBSD), stopped when Caldera offered to take over their Linux development. Do I need to go into what the Linux landscape would look like if Netscape was permitted to drop Linux support? Can we picture a world where muttering "ESR" would be followed by "who??"?

    o The first version of RPM was developed using Caldera funds. Hmmm...

    o NFS support for Linux (at least some mutations of it) is still maintained by Olaf Kirch, a Caldera engineer

    o The LSB project's reference platform lead is Ralf Flaxa, a Caldera engineer

    o Nick Petreley, the main evangelist and marketeer for LSB, works for Caldera

    o Caldera supports projects like XFree86, KDE, and Willows

    o Caldera is responsible for the first Compaq Netelligent NIC drivers

    o Caldera has open sourced both the NKFS module used by their NetWare client (they can't open source their NetWare client because THEY DON'T OWN THE TECHNOLOGY; NOVELL DOES) and their Lizard installer. I recall lots of you bitching about Lizard being closed source. It's been open for a while; are you using it? Somehow I doubt it (it's easier to bitch than to back up your words with actions, isn't it?).

    I could probably go on, but what good would it do? The average Slashdotter will probably see to it that this remains moderated down to 0 or below so that nobody will see it. It's safer that way. We must make sure that Caldera does not get credit for anything! (Give me a break...)
  • Right here officer, it's the post right above this one. He's the world's most uninventive troll.

    No sir, you have to click on the "parent" link ... aw forget it. I'll arrest him myself.
  • Maybe the Caldera move will actually enable us to call it UNIX, in the same way that Solaris, AIX and HPUX are all UNIX.

    Somehow, I think that if the Unix trademark does come into play, it will apply to Caldera's distro only.

    I don't say this because of any predisposition of Caldera behavior, I say it only because when a company gets ahold of a trademark, they don't usually hand it out to whoever wants to use it.

  • Caldera, SCO deny takeover talks (Score:4)

    by Chyeburashka ( 122715 ) on Thursday July 20, 2000 @03:42AM (#919049) Homepage
    The denial story is here. [theregister.co.uk]

    Meanwhile, consider the following:

    • Novell bought Unix from ATT
    • Ray Noorda was CEO of Novell
    • SCO bought Unix from Novell
    • Ray Noorda owns 83.5% of Caldera
    Maybe Mr. Noorda just wants to get Unix back at a fire sale price.

  • We must make sure that Caldera does not get credit for anything! (Give me a break...)

    And, just as a small aside, when I needed to install Linux on some old 486 boxes to run DNS and NAT, Red Hat and Mandrake curled up and died (Signal 9) right off the bat, but Cladera installed and ran without a whimper.

  • I think you missed the point. Of course EMC boxen are not "SCO-Inside."

    However, there is software/drivers for SCO to USE an EMC array, and probably even some of the associated management software.

  • Or, that moderation has gotten to the point that humor is often branded off-topic, or flamebait, that people either have to post anonymous coward, or put in disclaimers.

  • Damn I need to start getting up earlier. I was just going to post EXACTLY what you just wrote! I think he should trollslap or modslap (what ever it's being called this week) himself and quit posting stupid crap like this.
    F'ing Trolls! [slashdot.org]
  • Well, one thing I would like to see out of this is the open sourcing to the early unixes, which SCO currently holds the rights to.
  • If I remember correctly, Taco Bell uses SCO. If the merger happens, does this mean Taco Bell will open source their infamous "green sauce"?

    Sorry, was just feeling a little random today.

  • Well, they probably wouldn't pick that as their new name.

    On a somewhat more serious note (I just woke up, there is a limit to how serious I can be in a precoffee state ;-) ), this could be a good thing for the freenix community if Caldera ends up incorporating goodies from SCO in a source-available form. I can also see how this is a good business move for Caldera. They've always been one of the most business-oriented linux distributers (server and desktop), and I can see that having access to SCO's infrastructure would help further that aim.


    --

  • I think it's a shame that Caldera's Linux distribution doesn't get more attention from the community. I use it, and in my opinion it is one of the best distributions out there. It is easily 6 months ahead of the competition in terms of install tools, admin tools, etc. It's certainly WAY ahead of RedHat.

    Check it out - you might be surprised.
  • Well, I don't know what's in eDesktop. I have/had 2.2.

  • (No, this isn't offtopic - it's a joke. And probably a bad one at that. But at least there's no choice to moderate down for bad taste.)

    Thanks to the impending merger of CNET and Ziff-Davis [slashdot.org], in the near future we will no longer subject to read these rumors and rampant speculation at two news sites fighting for banner impressions, but only one, since we'll be able to get our Jesse Berst together with patented banner advertising [slashdot.org] at a single, unified source of tech news overwhelmed by crap-with-paying-banners.

    (disclaimer: yes, I know it's not really a "merger," and I have nothing against these sites other than the aformentioned Jesse Berst and rediculous patents. Besides, they'll probably both stay open and cover the exact same topics in separate articles in order to create more banner views.)

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