Eric S. Raymond Rips SCO a New One

[jtpenrod]

Eric S. Raymond, of the Open Source Initiative has put a "white paper" up on the OSI website that clearly demonstrates that SCO's claims against IBM are basically full of shit.      

quote:SCO's claim to have been a significant enterprise player is false

SCO's attempts to confuse the issues in this complaint begin early, in Paragraph 1.(c) where it asserts: ?UNIX and SCO/UNIX are widely used in the corporate, or ?enterprise? computing environment.?

While this claim is literally true, it is misleading in that it fails to distinguish between the market share of SCO's own Unixes (SCO OpenServer and Unixware) and those of competitors such as Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. By failing to so distinguish, it conveys the impression that SCO's market share in the enterprise segment has been significant, thus magnifying the putative harm done by IBM's alleged misconduct.

The truth is otherwise. SCO never had significant enterprise market share either before or after its purchase of the Bell Labs codebase from Novell. Their strength has been in franchise operations including McDonald's, Burger King, and Pizza Hut, which involve lots of parallel small deployments with no individual site requiring enterprise technology.

Examination of SCO's 10Ks reveals that, even were we to assume that every dime of their revenue came from the enterprise market, their 2002 share could not have exceeded 3.1% [14] This is at the level of statistical noise.

In fact, SCO's own complaint concedes that its historical strength has been in low-end systems used by small businesses. The principal author did SCO Unix consulting in the early 1990s, configuring systems for a small-town police station and a dental practice; anyone familiar with the industry would recognize that these were entirely typical SCO deployments. And SCO's most recent 10K [15] states, in part ?Our business is focused on serving the needs of small businesses, including replicated site franchisees of Fortune 1000 companies[16], to have reliable, cost effective Linux and Unix operating systems and software products to power computers running on Intel architecture.?

Conspicuously absent in SCO's most recent mission statement is any talk of 16-way servers or enterprise data centers. In fact, SCO's history of non-performance in the enterprise market is not only consistent from long before the beginning of IBM's involvement with Linux in 1999-2000, it predates the 1991 origin of Linux itself. SCO's claim that IBM's behavior with regard to improving Linux's enterprise scalability did it harm should be evaluated in the light of SCO's failure over more than a decade before that to even seriously attempt to be competitive in the enterprise market.

There's lots more where that came from. The "white paper" is quite a bit longer, but well worth a read. For more details: OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint

Go Eric!  
________________________________________
Live Free or Die: Linux

"There: now you'll never have to look at those dirty Windows anymore"
      --Daffy Duck

[bloodpet]

It's funny that SCO's saying that Linux is far inferior to UNIX systems when their own UNIX system (Unixware) is actually inferior to Linux.
In addition, the features that makes their UNIX system didn't came from them, but were just (probably) derived from the innovations of others. They might have even done the opposite of their claims... they could have added code from Linux into Unixware.

[Heywood]

quote:  UNIX system (Unixware) is actually inferior to Linux.
 

Amen to that. I think SCO has been been a pain in a lot of people's asses, but this last move really alienates them from the pack. The price they are going to pay for this will be a steep one, to say the least.

[GoodwillMan]

This is probably a move by the CEO so that Microsoft or IBM just buy them out.

[Refalm]

Eric S. Raymond rules. I've read the Dutch version of his book (which was well translated because Eric himself helped the translater) The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It's very neat, esspecially when he goes to a Microsoft conference and askes a lot of questions so that those 20-year old Steve Ballmer fuckers freak out