[TUHS] Another response to SCO vs. Linux

Hi All, I have been an avid UNIX fan since 1983 when I read my first UNIX manual and realized the power and flexibility of the command line utilities and portability of the C compiler. I have used many flavors of *NIX and the companies I worked for sold a lot of SCO products. However, it became increasingly annoying to have to spend an extra $1,000 to get a C compiler. Beginning in 1994, we began replacing AT&T Unix, SCO Xenix, and SCO Unix with Linux. The final straw for us using SCO was when a major client upgraded their system from a 2-CPU NCR to a 4-CPU Gateway and it took us hours to locate all the necessary drivers to make it fly. Then afterwards, the client could not find their license materials. Just for fun, we popped in a RH7.1 version of Linux and it booted fine, located all the hardware and installed itself in about a half-hour. It has been running that way for the last two years. We had another client simply upgrade their SCO Unix system from a Pentium-100 to a Pentium III. After spending hours trying to move their SCO license and finding out that the bootloaders didn't like *something* (unknown to this day) we went back to the customer and suggested another path. Today, that system is running Linux/Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL. The bottom line is that Linux works well. The fact that it is nearly free (cost of media/downloads/time etc.) is a nice bonus. IMHO, SCO is a victim of their own design (who would symbolically link 1,000 files to some strange /opt/SCO/.../.../etc/init.d/....??? I guess when your business models don't pan out, you can always sue somebody ... especially when someone like Microsoft gives you the money. Do you really think Microsoft would pay $10,000,000 to anyone else without a fight and without trying every other business tactic that they have used in the past? Finally, to threaten pulling IBM's AIX license unless they "settle" is hubris. My only fear is that a judge might think 80 out of 2.5 million lines of code has some significant value :-/ I sincerely hope the dialogue of practical arguments against SCO that I have seen in this list make it to the right people in defense of IBM. Sincerely, Jim Capp