SCO visit

[Colin McGregor]

I went out to the SCO City to City tour.

Well, there were under 30 people at the event at peak (a few people came and
went during the meeting) and well, it was strange...

SCO noted they had the backing of the following firms for their City-to-City
Tour:

- Hewlett-Packard
- Microlight
- LoneStar Software
- Ericom Software

though they noted there was some question of how much they could promote H-P
on their website, H-P was supporting this tour...

There were some open lies told by the SCO people like they put up a slide
that said:

   "SCO, owner of the UNIX operating system is a world-wide leading provider
of software technology business applications..."

Now I will not get into the "a world-wide leading provider" bit as you could
stretch that hard enough to claim it true, rather without the approval of
"The Open Group" it isn't (officially) Unix, in other words SCO can not say
what is or is legally UNIX. Also, IBM's OS/390 has gotten that official UNIX
designation, without any reference to SCO or SCO owned code, so there is
more than the one UNIX (even if you buy ALL of SCO's implied F.U.D. (Fear
Uncertainty Doubt)).

Goals noted for SCO were:

1. Increasing Company Value
2. Attain Profitability
3. Relaunch the SCO Brand
4. Creating Partner $$$
5. Establish IP Leadership

They noted that they had done points one to three well, but were not doing
so well on four and five. On point five the SCO Rep. raised the question
"Should software be free?". Their answer was as long as the developer wanted
to make it available and it did not involve theft of someone else's
intellectual property (IP). IP from SCO's point of view is:

- Copyrights
- Contracts
- Trade Secrets
- Know How
- Methods

The last two being so broad, that well, who on this mailing list hasn't
arguably stepped on what SCO might argue is their IP.

The SCO rep noted he had been asked to not get into to much detail regarding
the lawsuits currently flying. One reseller present noted he wanted the
lawsuits at an end because when his customers hear lawsuit, they tend to
walk away. SCO talked about and put some emphasis on their current client
base which includes:

- McDonalds
- Taco Bell
- Shoppers Drugmart
- KFC
- Kmart
- Pizza Hut
- TI

With the possible exception of TI we are talking a heavy emphasis on modest
size/scope highly reliable heavily replicated point of sale systems (i.e.:
EVERY McDonalds in Canada could have exactly the hardware/software set-up
with only a single configuration file being different in each location...).
In other words no talk about the desktop or desktop solutions...

One of the resellers I spoke to during one of the breaks had a laptop with
him running ... RedHat Linux (with a small RedHat logo stuck on the case).

In going forward SCO noted that in first quarter (January - March) of 2004
SCO plans to add the followings to Unixware:

- PAM authentication
- Basic Sound Support
- Native XFree86

I ought to look-up how long Linux has had these programs that SCO Unixware
is just about to get....

There was some question as to the availability of source code for Samba,
Squid, Apache, and Mozilla. One of the resellers there wanted to know how he
could get the source for these programs and the SCO people present were not
sure if it was available...

There was a talk about SCO going into a web based solution for vertical
markets, in particular a web based the supply chain management solution. As
a case study they were looking at a set of oil and gas distribution
industry.

As for free stuff, besides a mediocre breakfast and a good lunch I did get
the following:

- a T-Shirt that has to be read to be believed, in that it makes a series of
statements all true or arguably true about Linux and leaves the impression
that Linux is illegal, without actually saying so.
- A copy of Lonetar back-up software
- A copy of Microlight back-up software
- I won the draw at the end of the show and so I will get my pick of one of
the following:
  - A SCO mail server
  - A SCO authentication program that will let me manage Windows
2000/Unix/Linux users from a Windows 2000 server.

One of the charities I deal with could use the last program, but I want
Windows 2000 out, rather than permanently fixed into that landscape... How
much would anyone on this mailing list pay me for a new SCO mail server, OR
a SCO authentication program for Windows 2000? I mean it should soon be a
collectors item from the late "great" SCO :-) .

Colin McGregor

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