[mdlug] SCO is baack.....

[Rich Clark <rrclark@rrclark.net>]

On Sat, 16 Feb 2008, Bruce Smith wrote:

>> I, for one, came here right after reading slashdot and was a little
>> bummed there wasn't a bunch of chatter over this milestone for SCO.
>
> I apologize if I killed this thread and getting side tracked.
> Let me try to put it back on subject.
>
> Who in their right mind would invest in SCO?
> Especially ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS???

A multi-billionaire Saudi financier well-connected with Bush and Gates in 
order to keep the FUD alive.

> I admit not being current with SCO's business.  Do they have any
> products other than SCO Unix?  If that's all they have, then I can't
> imagine how they could make money.

Well, there's the Me, Inc mobile embedded software spin-off that some 
analysts think is worth a ton of dough due to its possible marketability. 
Having never seen such offering, it's impossible to tell either way, 
though. It's based on the Unix codebase, likely with lots of the odd open 
source stuff glued in there.

> AFAIK, SCO Unix hasn't been updated in years (decades?), and nobody in
> their right mind would buy it now.  Even "back in it's day" it sucked
> (IMO) - I've seen it.

I wish I had never seen it. I used to service a bunch of dental offices 
where a local OEM dumped a billing platform based on SCO's ancient 
OpenServer OS. A true nightmare to support, considering that most of those 
installations dated back to the early 90s, most of it still running on the 
original hardware.

> The only nitch it had was the ability to run on
> PC hardware (it was cheaper), but compared to other [non PC] Unix
> vendors of the day, it sucked!  There are certainly much better, and
> cheaper, options for running *nix on PC hardware these days!

Linux on any cheapo box can do it for dimes on hundreds of dollars.

> Do they have any source of income, other than legacy Unix
> implementations still paying maintenance?  That has to be shrinking.

They gots a lawsuites dat could go to teh MOON!

> Before he retired recently, a friend of mine was a SCO Unix admin at a
> branch of the US military.  Places like that are not fast to change,
> but eventually SCO Unix has to become extinct, doesn't it?

I can only imagine what a patchwork quilt the POS systems at places like 
McDonalds, Taco Hell, and Wheredy's could be, since I believe they have 
all run SCO Unix for decades.