| The sad irony of SCO |
Dec. 23, 2005
Well, SCO has now shown its cards to the courts.
We, the Linux-using public, won't know for months exactly what they had to show. But, after following SCO, Caldera, Novell, IBM, Linux, Unix, and all the court cases for ages, I'm sure that their evidence amounts to... nothing of any significance.
You know what the sad thing about this whole affair has been?
If SCO has only stuck to doing Linux, they'd be a winner.
They, and not Red Hat, might have been the ones reporting great financial results. They, and not SUSE, would likely have been the company that Novell picked up to jump-start its operating system business.
Sound unlikely? I don't think so.
Caldera was neck-and-neck with Red Hat there for a while, and I always thought they had a better business plan. Remember, Red Hat only really pulled ahead when it switched gears from trying to be a consumer and business Linux retailer to its much more successful Linux subscription business.
Caldera, under Ransom Love, was also the company that led the way, with the still-born UnitedLinux, to supporting the LSB (Linux Standard Base) for all distributions. When you look at what the DCC Alliance is trying to do today for Debian Linux and the LSB, you see a reflection of what UnitedLinux tried to do earlier.
And as for Novell, Caldera, which would become SCO, was founded by ex-Novell employees. What could have been a more natural move, than for the ex-Novell staffers to return to Novell once Novell finally figured out that they had been right all along and that Linux was Novell's future?
Perhaps the most ironic thing of all, is that even if SCO had still forsaken Linux for Unix, but hadn't gone lawsuit happy, the company would have been profitable for the last year or so.
You don't have to believe me; SCO's CFO spelled it out when I talked to him this week.
It all makes me rather tired. I've rather liked Caldera and SCO over the years.
OpenServer 6, SCO's main Unix distribution, is a great operating system. If stability is your biggest concern of all about an operating system, OpenServer is the operating system for you.
Ah well, those are all "what might have beens." Instead, SCO decided to strike out at the entire Linux world. In the end, the only company that's been seriously hurt by the past two and a half years of fighting has been SCO.
I just wish it hadn't been that way.
--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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