SCO

Sun Oct 19 10:39:03 PDT 2003

Quoting richard childers / kg6hac (fscked at pacbell.net):
> Now, if you were using SCO, I could understand your frustration ... I'm 
> experiencing it, as I speak ...

Replace it or walk away.  it's the best answer.

Over a decade ago, I wokred for a VAR who sold CAD systems - on
Sun, and SCO and SGI.  SCO was rare, but I got saddled with the
customers who had it.  License issues with TCP/IP software.
Installed on 15 machines and - doh!- 1 license was used on two
machines.  Which two? It didn't bother to say - it just shut down.

Put a call in and was told I'd get a call back within a week.
Impressive.  After taking the users down for most of an afternoon
trying combinations of machines to get this error - elimination
games - and generally wasting a day and pissing off me and the
customers, the customer started replacing older machines with Suns.

Then add things like bugs - ./rhosts didn't work with 8 letter
accounts, a NIS implementation that set me off in waves of giggles
(rcp of passwd (requiring a /.rhosts) and a shell script merge)
and generally pathetic code quality, support and pricing - the
clients and my company were disgusted with SCO.

$15k for Sun vs. $8k for PC+SCO was cheaper to run and manage.

When I got a all a year later from SCO offering us a deal to move
our customers to the new version of SCO Unix, I let them know that
we'd rather pay twice the price for SPARCs and SunOS and save money
in the end than ever deal with SCO again.

My friend at MS offered that since MS owned a huge stake in SCO,
it was clearly their effort to make even DOS and Windows 3.0 seem
solid and intuitive and robust compared to Unix.

This is no small reason why a can't help but fall into a combinartion
of giggless and fury when SCO claims that *anyone* stole code
from them.  SMP, file systems - pretty much anything SCO touched
or tried to implement, they did poorly and sloppily.

Even while BSDi is in its death throws with a company that has
no clue how to sell or market it, it runs most SCO binaries.
It's also built by professionals who try to get money by making
better product, not through litigation.

I've not seen ANYTHING that I'd run on a SCO system by choice.

Note to Daryl: you didn't lose to Linux because they took your IP,
you lose because the code you issue, the support you offer and
the way you do business is repellant - to geeks, to businesses.