SCO. SCO. SCO. If nothing else, it's one hellua way to get their name in print, worldwide. <SCO THOUGHT> Uh-oh Linux is gaining ground in shops small and large, worldwide Linux is impacting Microsoft, but is affecting commercial *nixes more We're a commercial *nix We have a small and shrinking marketshare We can't compete with Linux We're doomed Wait We own UNIX! We think Let's sue, get bought, buy beachfr SCO. SCO. SCO. If nothing else, it’s one hellua way to get their name in print, worldwide. Uh-oh Linux is gaining ground in shops small and large, worldwide Linux is impacting Microsoft, but is affecting commercial *nixes more We’re a commercial *nix We have a small and shrinking marketshare We can’t compete with Linux We’re doomed Wait We own UNIX! We think Let’s sue, get bought, buy beachfront property in Cabo THOUGHT>I’ve been thinking that this suit will have an extremely significant impact on the loser. There’s no middle ground, really. If — amazingly — they actually have a case and can stop beating it to death with mindless acts of vituperative obstinacy, then open source has a problem, IBM has a problem, all the Linux vendors have problems. Regardless of whether the code is freely available, who can guarantee that every bit is original, or not under copyright? Who can prove that it was stolen in the first place? The courts are having a tough time figuring out what NAT is,, and we expect them to comprehend not only the intricacies of this case, but the ramifications? I sincerely hope that this was a real possibility, but I simply don’t see it.So we’re left with the hope that they’ll either be bought, or truly go down in flames. There is no real alternative. SCO simply isn’t a viable OS. Even without all this legal nonsense, this would be the case in a few years anyway. If every so-inclined 13 year old kid can download *bsd and any Linux distro for free, run it for years before entering the job market, then why will they choose SCO, who ceased doing anything relevant with their OS years ago? Uh-oh Linux is gaining ground in shops small and large, worldwide Linux is impacting Microsoft, but is also affecting other server platforms We’re a server platform We have a sizeable but shrinking marketshare We can’t compete with Linux We’re doomed Wait We can play this game We own UNIX! We think We have a solid, standards-based directory product People like it Linux needs a solid, standards-based directory product We can port it to Linux Maybe we can port more than that Let’s start with the kernel THOUGHT> Novell hasn’t been on my radar for awhile. I think Novell’s server products are stable, if somewhat stodgy. Novell has a knack for painting their products into the proverbial corner, with odd artificial limitations in odd places, and issues with back-end process integration. Oh, and the server interfaces rot. They do have a solid directory, though, and while Linux has always had LDAP, Novell actually puts a pretty face on it. Novell’s seen the writing on the wall, just as SCO has, but they’ve decided that it’s in their best interests to keep the lawyers in the pen and swim with the tide. Novell 7 will likely be a creation the likes of which haven’t ever been seen, and may indeed wind up not quite meeting expectations, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction. Novell seems to almost get it… if they unwaveringly continue down this road, they will gain substantial respect in the minds of the technorati.It’s not lost on me that I’ve borne witness to at least four major player turnarounds in recent years. Many more moves have been made in the server OS space, but these resonate. The easy ones are IBM’s US$1Bn Linux investment and Sun’s odd in-the-pool-or-out Linux moves. These moves have been very public and very intriguing, but haven’t changed my overall opinions of the companies involved. Sun is still Sun, IBM still IBM to me.Apple, on the other hand, has changed immensely. As with the other companies referenced, Apple saw what was happening, and hung onto Steve Job’s apron for dear life. It must’ve been a great meeting where Steve pointed out that his investment in NeXT almost 16 years ago was saving Apple’s ass today. If you’re not aware, Mac OS X is largely based on NeXTStep, the OS of Steve’s Job’s NeXT Computer. There’s a BSD layer, Display PDF instead of Display PostScript, but it’s there, most of it, from the little login-screen shake on a bad password to the directory navigation views to the Mach kernel, it’s daddy was the NeXT; we have what NeXT promised in 1989, delivered by Apple in 2001. Having owned several NeXT systems, I can speak to it’s elegance and performance; it was just too far ahead of it’s time. So in the last two years, I’ve gone from “Apple, schmapple. Talk to me when you have anything close to a coherent IP stack” to “How did I live without my tiBook?”. Novell seems to be moving in that direction too, with their push towards open source and Linux interoperability. I never had anything against either Novell or Apple, I just didn’t care for their products; I thought that they had a limited purpose and small market due to their relative lack of solid marketing (Novell) and playing nice with others (Apple). I’d like nothing better than to be cheering Novell and Apple in the coming years… time will tell.And as always, *BSD just keeps chugging along like Brain to everyone else’s Inspector Gadget. Will the Beastie ever die? Let’s hope not.