SCO story ends with a whimper
Summary: As quietly as possible last week, through a required SEC filing, SCO quietly canned CEO Darl McBride, the architect of its audacious "better luck through lawsuits" business plan.
Remember SCO?
Back when I started writing about open source and Linux, in 2005, you couldn't swing a cat without catching someone with an opinion about SCO.
SCO claimed Linux was infringing its patentscopyright. SCO claimed it owned Linux. SCO sued IBM.
CORRECTION: Microsoft claims patent rights on Linux code. The SCO case was about copyright.
Once SCO built a railroad of lawsuits, made it race against time. Now it's done.
As quietly as possible last week, through a required SEC filing, SCO quietly canned CEO Darl McBride, the architect of its audacious "better luck through lawsuits" business plan.
They didn't just ease the man out. They eliminated the positions of CEO and president, which McBride held. The top name on the org chart is now COO Jeff Hunsaker (above), whose background includes stints at WordPerfect, Novell and Corel (so he knows from failure).
Anyone have a few words they want to say over the body?
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
BAH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
RE: SCO story ends with a whimper
William Shakespear should have expanded on his "first ... the lawyers" bit!
Someone remind me
: o )
RE: SCO story ends with a whimper
SCO Xenix & Unix
eclipsed in the history books by this sad and destructive approach at the
end.
They got what they deserved
Word to the wise: Try earning money through the creation of quality products and services, not through the court system. :-)
It's like the good book says
What about Laura Didio?
But from her LinkedIn page, it looks like Yankee Group might have dumped her as well. Two casualties?
Didiot, Enderle, Murphy and...O'Gara
But Enderle seems to be unscathed
RE: SCO story ends with a whimper
Remember
History of SCO and Xenix
re: David
Why? Just curious.
Performance, stability, security, and so on
stable platform, being based on Unix design principles. If MS had stayed
with Xenix and dropped DOS/Win, we wouldn't have had to wait 20 years
for them to finally release a usable and stable OS. (I didn't wait.)
I used to demo SCO Xenix at trade shows. The starting point was to have
two identical PCs, one running DOS + Windows with a "DIR" chugging up
the screen, and the other running Xenix with an "ls -l" flying off the
screen. Then we would move on to show multiple programs truly
multitasking on Xenix, while DOS/Win 3.x struggled even just
[i]loading[/i] a second app such as Clock or Notepad. Sigh....
DOS "multi-tasking"
Then Quarterdeck really exploited it on the '386 with their Deskview application. Very, very sweet for the time on a PC. At least it enabled DOS to be in the same ballpark as SCO Unix on a '386 - well, at least the parking lot ;)
So why is it, exactly, that DOS and early Windows were so bad? Microsoft obviously had some Unix/Xenix talent early on. Heck, they even ran their internal IT systems on it rather than eat their own dogfood. They had to wait until NT 4.0 before they got completely off Unix...
Xenix and Microsoft
'Xenix at Work' was edited by Woodcock and Halvorson and published by Microsoft Press in '86. The first chapter gives some interesting details about Xenix and its history and benefits, and ends with a very interesting summary:
"As other operating systems evolve, they will begin to emulate more of the UNIX features than they do now. As in any commercial environment, it's the nature of the beast to turn toward whatever is working best. But XENIX-your XENIX-is already a faithful implementation of UNIX, in form, format and command. For the multiuser, multitasking environment, tomorrow is here today. XENIX is now what most other operating systems will become."
The other book, 'Understanding XENIX, A Conceptual Guide' was written by Weinberg and Groff and published by Que in '85. It's second chapter, "A XENIX Perspective" has some (to me) amazing info. Here is one paragraph:
"Whereas MS-DOS was developed by Microsoft specifically under contract to IBM, XENIX was developed as a strategic product. As early as the 1970s, Gates was convinced that the coming generation of 16- and 32-bit microprocessors would demand a more powerful operating system then the CP/M standard of the day. Gates was an early convert to UNIX and believed it could eventually become a dominant microcomputer operating system. By being the first to offer a version of UNIX suitable for microcomputers, Gates hoped to establish XENIX as a standard."
Interesting stuff.
Death to SCO
[i]"The 'Old SCO' was worthy of our continued affection."[/i]
Sorry, but I have to disagree strongly.
I used SCO Unix and I hated it. It was a nightmare.
SCO Unix was the only Unix to ever cause me to lose data. Give me any other flavor of Unix before I will touch SCO again.
Back in 1992, I created a database for training, and it would lose parts of the data partition, causing me to recreate that work twice, and no, it was not user error. Data corruption was a real problem with SCO Unix, and support from them was lacking. They were always a crappy company in my view, and the road to lawsuit as product only underscores just how bad a company they ultimately became. Good riddance.
RE: SCO story ends with a whimper