[Cialug] SCO's not dead yet

[Theron Conrey]

You failed to mention the tuber factor....

-----Original Message-----
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of Josh More
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 4:23 PM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: RE: [Cialug] SCO's not dead yet

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
> >
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