Please be aware, this is old SCO. New SCO is really Caldera (renamed), a Linux company that bought old SCO.
SCO OpenServer was a product you saw everywhere in small companies. All on i386 platform, which made it a cheap UNIX. 1997 was the time Linux was coming around as a competitor.
It had a very 1980s feel to it. SCO had just started licensing AT&T UnixWare, but they failed switching their customers to it. If the customer had to switch to a different platform, they often switched to Linux.
Around 2001 Caldera bought old SCO. Caldera was already struggling to compete with RedHat. Buying old SCO didn't help, they could not convert customers to Caldera Linux. After a reorganisation new management came in (2003) and that was the end of the software business.
By the way, before the Caldera aquisition there was already a SCO Linux Skunkworks project running in the UK, but management was hesitating to put it on the market.
> Buying old SCO didn't help, they could not convert customers to Caldera Linux. After a reorganisation new management came in (2003) and that was the end of the software business.
And 2003 was also when a company called the SCO Group began making wild accusations about Linux.
I can't say that I found a truly compelling reason to use SCO, nor did I uncover any features that Linux seems to lack. ... But, if you can pick OpenServer up for free, it's the best proof that Linux has really become a commercial-grade product.
Here we are 25 years later, long after the whole SCO vs Linux dust has settled, and you're hard pressed to find hardware that doesn't have Linux on it in some way shape or form. (And for the pedants, I know there is a lot out there that has no Linux on it, but we're talking about 1997 vs 2022). Linux is a mature, enterprise level OS that is even running on different planets.
It is possible on the tandem non-stop dual/multi cpu architecture SCO had some minor advantage, in a post pyramid world: you got effective dual CPU reliable hosting, on a platform which was basically just a PC with extras.
That aside, it sucked. It divered from BSD enough to be very confusing, it wasn't as good as Solaris, and Linux was just more functional on any other platform you could get.
I only knew it worked because we ran on donated hardware. If we'd had to buy, we would not have bought this unit.
I remember having to deploy some software I had written (on Linux) on SCO OpenServer for a client, along with apache and a few standard things around this time. I was shocked when I got on the open server box how primitive it was compared to Linux, FreeBSD and Irix, which were the other Unix flavours I had used at that time. Just seemed so weird that a “commercial unix” was able to charge customers while being so bad compared to the free variants that ran on the same hardware.
I worked at a place that had some extremely specialized high-speed printers, which came with print servers that were running OpenServer several years past when that was a reasonable thing to do. I don't know whether it was SCO or the vendor at fault, but these boxes had dozens of unnecessary services on them, including an unpatched copy of the NCSA httpd that was nearly 10 years old. Telnet, finger, chargen, and all those other obsolete services you'd see mentioned in inetd were all enabled by default.
I already had a healthy dislike of SCO from their Linux lawsuits from years before, but actually using a SCO product was even worse.
I got it once on a CD on a magazine. I installed it and just worked, even X. My Linux memories from this time are very different. But in the end, I did nothing with it. Maybe I should try it again in a VM just for fun.
Yeah that’s not true. DG/UX was one of the best commercial operating systems I used at the time, and it was fantastic - because it came chock full of GNU tools.
What they can't do is take GPL'd software and release modified versions of it which split the community and can't be folded back into the mainline. The GPL doesn't allow that kind of harmful behavior.
>which split the community and can't be folded back into the mainline. The GPL doesn't allow that kind of harmful behavior.
I think you really should read the GPL again, you can split whatever you want, you can make them incompatible...really whatever you want, BUT the modified GPL software need the changes opensourced too, IF and just IF you redistribute that code.
Please be aware, this is old SCO. New SCO is really Caldera (renamed), a Linux company that bought old SCO.
SCO OpenServer was a product you saw everywhere in small companies. All on i386 platform, which made it a cheap UNIX. 1997 was the time Linux was coming around as a competitor.
It had a very 1980s feel to it. SCO had just started licensing AT&T UnixWare, but they failed switching their customers to it. If the customer had to switch to a different platform, they often switched to Linux.
Around 2001 Caldera bought old SCO. Caldera was already struggling to compete with RedHat. Buying old SCO didn't help, they could not convert customers to Caldera Linux. After a reorganisation new management came in (2003) and that was the end of the software business.
By the way, before the Caldera aquisition there was already a SCO Linux Skunkworks project running in the UK, but management was hesitating to put it on the market.
> Around 2001 Caldera bought old SCO. Caldera was already struggling to compete with RedHat.
The rest of Old SCO (the Santa Cruz Operation) renamed itself to Tarantella and got bought out by Sun in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantella,_Inc%2e
> Buying old SCO didn't help, they could not convert customers to Caldera Linux. After a reorganisation new management came in (2003) and that was the end of the software business.
And 2003 was also when a company called the SCO Group began making wild accusations about Linux.
Take that, SCO.
What is that scumbag CEO (name redacted, he doesn't deserve to be remembered) up to these days?
Per Wikipedia, looks like he filed Ch 13 bankruptcy in Dec 2020.
Apparently David Boies didn't soil his reputation enough with SCO:
https://www.linux.com/news/scos-attorney-david-boies-take/
So now we can also remember him for Theranos and trying to intimidate Tyler Schultz, among others.
You mean this guy? Brace yourself...
https://darl01.wixsite.com/mysite
It is possible on the tandem non-stop dual/multi cpu architecture SCO had some minor advantage, in a post pyramid world: you got effective dual CPU reliable hosting, on a platform which was basically just a PC with extras.
That aside, it sucked. It divered from BSD enough to be very confusing, it wasn't as good as Solaris, and Linux was just more functional on any other platform you could get.
I only knew it worked because we ran on donated hardware. If we'd had to buy, we would not have bought this unit.
I remember having to deploy some software I had written (on Linux) on SCO OpenServer for a client, along with apache and a few standard things around this time. I was shocked when I got on the open server box how primitive it was compared to Linux, FreeBSD and Irix, which were the other Unix flavours I had used at that time. Just seemed so weird that a “commercial unix” was able to charge customers while being so bad compared to the free variants that ran on the same hardware.
I worked at a place that had some extremely specialized high-speed printers, which came with print servers that were running OpenServer several years past when that was a reasonable thing to do. I don't know whether it was SCO or the vendor at fault, but these boxes had dozens of unnecessary services on them, including an unpatched copy of the NCSA httpd that was nearly 10 years old. Telnet, finger, chargen, and all those other obsolete services you'd see mentioned in inetd were all enabled by default.
I already had a healthy dislike of SCO from their Linux lawsuits from years before, but actually using a SCO product was even worse.
I got it once on a CD on a magazine. I installed it and just worked, even X. My Linux memories from this time are very different. But in the end, I did nothing with it. Maybe I should try it again in a VM just for fun.
The major reason Linux won is because it is actually Gnu/Linux. SCO can not use GNU software so it is basically done.
> SCO can not use GNU software so it is basically done.
Not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Skunkware
Yeah that’s not true. DG/UX was one of the best commercial operating systems I used at the time, and it was fantastic - because it came chock full of GNU tools.
It can and does and was already even in 97.
Anyone can use GNU software if they share the source. That's part of the GNU deal with its userbase.
>SCO can not use GNU software so it is basically done.
That's not true and you know it.
Anyone can use GPL'd software.
What they can't do is take GPL'd software and release modified versions of it which split the community and can't be folded back into the mainline. The GPL doesn't allow that kind of harmful behavior.
>which split the community and can't be folded back into the mainline. The GPL doesn't allow that kind of harmful behavior.
I think you really should read the GPL again, you can split whatever you want, you can make them incompatible...really whatever you want, BUT the modified GPL software need the changes opensourced too, IF and just IF you redistribute that code.
You completely misunderstood my point.