[Cialug] SCO's not dead yet

Mon Oct 8 16:22:50 CDT 2007

A few thoughts from someone who spent far too many years working on SCO
systems.

Yes, SCO is a rock solid unix, but bear in mind that architecting for
stability and architecting for extensibility are very different
operations.  Installing non-SCO software on SCO in a way that is
supportable is very difficult.

SCO and Novell both believe that they owned the rights to the term
"Unix".  Given how people have been saying for years that Linux is
compatible with Unix, but does not contain Unix, I do not believe that
it would in anyone's best interest to purchase SCO for the (disputed)
Unix name.  If SCO does go away, I do see it as possible that Novell may
take a lesser payment if they get can get undisputed control over the
Unix source, just to stabilize things for the future.

In many ways, they are in the same market position as Novell was before
they acquired SUSE.  They used to make a lot of money by selling
licenses, but those clients have been moving to Linux over the years. 
Their ability to sell high-priced Unix over Linux has eroded as FUD has
stopped working.  They never really pursued embedded systems and their
network stack was so horrible that they never had a serious play on the
Internet.  Their current stock price may well reflect their true value
as a company.

So, what value would a SCO purchase have?  I do not believe that anyone
would purchase them to support an internal system, as they have been
touting SCO's reliability for years.  Honestly, it *is* a rock solid and
stable system.  In fact, it's one that can run for years without updates
or maintenance.  (Hmm, wonder where all that projected maintenance
revenue went.)  If someone wanted to purchase SCO to make it easier to
move to Linux, it would be much cheaper to just stop updates and move to
Linux.  You could put a deep-inspection firewall in front of each SCO
server or move the servers to virtual environments and keep the legacy
systems running indefinitely.  A SCO purchase would not make sense for
that.

Similarly, a SCO purchase would not make sense for someone wanting to
take over SCO's intellectual property.  The property with intrinsic
value is in dispute (IBM and Novell) and the rest of it is, at best, a
third tier player.  In fact, I only see two value propositions:

1) IBM might be interested in buying SCO simply to make the lawsuit go
away.  I see this as unlikely, as I believe that IBM is very likely to
win the suit, and having legal precedence on this issue would be good
for the industry.  That said, IBM might wind up acquiring all of SCO's
assets by default if they win and SCO cannot pay.

2) Someone (Novell, RedHat, Ubuntu) might be interested in buying SCO
if they can get SCO's contracts with their existing customers.  Any one
of the above companies would love to get *their* Linux into McDonalds
and some of the other big clients.  Novell would likely have an easier
time of it, as their stable/secure Linux market story makes a conversion
from SCO pretty easy.  However, it would be a *huge* boost for Ubuntu's
planned server move and if they get a decent conversion rate they would
turn into a big server player practically over night.

-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701

>>> Theron Conrey <theron.conrey at dice.com> 10/08/07 3:24 PM >>> 
Right, So I'd look at it as a way (considering the final cost of
course) to keep alive and utilize your existing (and expensive) IT
infrastructure and help increase the odds of a future migration path as
opposed to an all out gut-and-replace down the line.  Buying what was
left (again cost) even at millions of dollars, may save well over that
amount in the long run.  Turning that code over, (cost sharing?) to a
large Linux stakeholder, and getting some agreement to provide an
upgrade path, would benefit the company financially, and allow for a
smoother migration, especially if people could write to the existing
code base.

But, coming down out of la-la land, I realize it would be hard to sell
it.  But heh, McD dresses up tubers better than anyone else so anything
is possible.

-Theron

-----Original Message-----
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On
Behalf Of Dave J. Hala Jr.
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 2:46 PM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: RE: [Cialug] SCO's not dead yet

That depends. Could you buy SCO for less than what a migration would
cost? If I was an old school corporate guy, its unlikely that I'd be
thinking about buying SCO and open sourcing their stuff so that I
(McDonalds) would benefit.

If they opened up SCO's stuff would the open source community improve
it? Would it benefit McDonalds? How long would it take?

If you did buy them, as a failing company, you'd probably consider it a
stop-gap measure to buy you some time before you did the migration
anyway.

I just can't believe that McDonalds corporate would take that kind of
chance, but who knows?  I just can't see quarter pounders made from
penguin meat as a profitable undertaking.

On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 14:35 -0500, Theron Conrey wrote:
> I'd argue that point.  I'm pretty sure that a company as big as McD
would benefit from just buying the remaining bits of software that SCO
actually owns that runs their environment rather then migrating. 
There's a reason that Sun purchased star office (and then began open
sourcing) rather than deploy windows office .  However, a fantastic
kicking would be delivered if McD (or another company) bought what was
left and open sourced whatever code they could find that was worth
anything.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On
Behalf Of Dave J. Hala Jr.
> Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 2:01 PM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
> Subject: RE: [Cialug] SCO's not dead yet
>
> Why would you buy them? It would be cheaper for McDonalds to switch
to Windows then buy SCO. Why continue the fight? They've obviously been
beaten -there's no "revenue" to be gained.
>
> :)  Dave
>
> On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 18:46 +0000, Nathan C. Smith wrote:
> > I would be concerned about a SCO-friendly company with deep
pockets
> > buying them and continuing the fight.  You have to wonder how many
> > people are left at the company and what the SCO-faithful still
look
> > like.  Article Says McDonald's is a client.  Why don't they buy
them?
> >
> > -Nate
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jonathan C. Bailey [mailto:jbailey at co.marshall.ia.us]
> > Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 1:30 PM
> > To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
> > Subject: Re: [Cialug] SCO's not dead yet
> >
> > I just read that and thought of Monty Python...
> >
> > "Bring out yer dead!"
> >
> >
> >
> > -Jon
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "David Champion" <dchampion at visionary.com>
> > To: "Central Iowa Linux Users Group" <cialug at cialug.org>
> > Sent: Monday, October 8, 2007 1:21:59 PM (GMT-0600)
America/Chicago
> > Subject: [Cialug] SCO's not dead yet
> >
> > Just FYI, SCO isn't dead yet...
> >
> >
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBa
> > si
> > c&arti
> > cleId=304668&source=NLT_OS&nlid=41
> >
> > Darl: "It's like the Linux faithful are lined up for the bad news.
> > They've got their confetti ready to throw, and everybody's all
excited."
> >
> > Anyone know where I can get some good confetti?
> >
> > -dc
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Cialug mailing list
> > Cialug at cialug.org
> > http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Cialug mailing list
> > Cialug at cialug.org
> > http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
> > _______________________________________________
> > Cialug mailing list
> > Cialug at cialug.org
> > http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cialug mailing list
> Cialug at cialug.org
> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
> _______________________________________________
> Cialug mailing list
> Cialug at cialug.org
> http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug

_______________________________________________
Cialug mailing list
Cialug at cialug.org
http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug
_______________________________________________
Cialug mailing list
Cialug at cialug.org
http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug