Re: [SLUG-POL] SCO WATCH: SCO Fails to file 10-Q

From: Bryan J. Smith (b.j.smith@ieee.org)
Date: Thu Mar 24 2005 - 11:06:02 EST


On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 11:02 -0500, Steven Buehler wrote:
> THE SCO GROUP, INC. RECEIVES NOTICE FROM
> NASDAQ REGARDING ITS DELINQUENT FIRST QUARTER FORM 10-Q
> ... cut ...

Regardless of the incorporation status of SCO at the time, if SCO
manages to make it to a Jury Trial in Utah, I see them winning against
IBM on several terms from the original March 2003 filing.

Sometimes I don't know which company scares me worse, SCO or IBM? I
used to think SCO, but given the fact that most people are oblivious to
what IBM did to Caldera-SCO, and what IBM is doing to some of its own
customers and other OEMs like HP, IBM might be worse. There is no
bigger target for IBM's AIX/Power platform right now than Linux/x86-64,
especially from very pro-community OEM players like HP.

This doesn't excuse what SCO has done May 2003 and later, but IBM
clearly took a Linux company and expensed it's future. They whole
reason Caldera bought SCO was to use Monterey/IA-64 as a high-end
capital base for "tiding over" its financials until its Linux business
became profitable -- a strategy IBM obliterated in one day back in 2001.
I wonder how many other companies, good Linux companies, will fall
victim to IBM in the future?

Especially since IBM is running this "Linux Quiz Show" whereby people
aren't tuning in for the substance, but only for the money. IBM's
recent $100M pledge to port its proprietary Notes codebase is just more
examples. To date, IBM has actually funded no where near the amounts of
actual community software unlike other OEMs like HP, let alone companies
like Red Hat. And the few they have have very restrictive licensing
agreements compared to HP, Red Hat and, even more surprisingly, Novell.

-- Bryan

P.S. Novell has been the most pleasant surprise -- and they have turned
SuSE into a better Fedora than Red Hat IMHO (long story). People have
accused me of being a "Red Hat apologist," and I have to admit I do act
like one, but with the new Fedora Core 4 Test 1, I think Red Hat is
starting to lose their staunchest of proponents -- including myself.
After all, Novell is maintaining a good alignment between SuSE Linux and
their new Novell Linux line. It's a mirror-reverse mirror of what Red
Hat Linux and Enterprise Linux was, but Fedora Core and Enterprise Linux
now seems less of. I don't know what's going on over there, but while I
like Fedora, it's clear Red Hat isn't maintaining it's 0-1-2 release
model anymore, and that's going to, again, alienate even the most
historically staunchest Red Hat proponents like myself very quickly.

-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                  b.j.smith@ieee.org 
---------------------------------------------------------------- 
Community software is all about choice, choice of technology.
Unfortunately, too many Linux advocates port over the so-called
"choice" from the commercial software world, brand name marketing.
The result is false assumptions, failure to focus on the real
technical similarities, but loyalty to blind vendor alignments.



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