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SCO's McBride lashes out
against Linux
8 August, 2005
by Robert Dutt
LAS VEGAS -- At the last few SCO Forums, SCO Group CEO Darl
McBride spent much of his time talking about the company's
legal battles with Linux. This year, though, McBride focused
much more on another front in the company's war with the open-source
operating system -- the marketplace.
Kicking off this year's SCO Forum reseller and customer event
at the MGM Grand here, McBride delivered the company's vision
of its competitive advantages against Linux at present.
The show is much smaller affair than the last two because
the company says it is making this Forum primarily a North
American event, although vice president Jeff Hunsaker did
note that 20 countries are represented here, "although
in smaller numbers."
McBride's Monday morning keynote was timed with the release
of another of his infamous "Open Letters" on the
company's Web site, highlighting in all ten reasons why it
feels its products are a better buy than Linux-based solutions
for many companies. As with previous McBride Open Letters,
the topic is likely to be hotly debated, and mostly refuted
from the open source development community.
Perhaps the company's biggest -- and most controversial --
point is its price message against Linux. McBride said that
with SCO, companies spend between $599 and $1,399 to purchase
OpenServer, and then are largely free to run it as long as
they like. By contrast, he said that most Linux distributions
that are business-ready charge a yearly maintenance fee for
using the software, fees which he said can tally between $350
and $2,500 per year. McBride called Linux's rallying cry of
"free software" a classic bait and switch, although
he clearly did not clarify the difference between, as Linux
users espouse, "free as in speech, as opposed to free
as in beer." "Free is a very powerful concept, but
at the end of the day, when you walk out of the store, you'd
prefer not have pay more than you have to," McBride said.
"There's an old proverb that say that free is the most
expensive price." Interestingly, McBride did praise Microsoft
Windows for offering a similar one-time fee structure, but
took them to task for requiring separate licenses for many
of the pieces of software that a business needs, such as database
servers and e-mail servers. "You end up paying one-time
fees for a bunch of other things as well with Windows,"
he said. Some Linux supporters have alleged that SCO's attacks
on Linux are supported by, or at least in collusion with,
Redmond. McBride said that other reasons to choose OpenServer
over Linux include a mature, 25-year hardened kernel and security
to go along with it, noting a report from research group mi2g
that calls SCO Unix the operating system with the lowest number
of vulnerabilities, while referring to the ever-evolving Linux
as "a hacker's paradise."
McBride also said that SCO has definite, customer-driven
roadmap for its products, comparing it to the Linux process,
which he described as "tied into a loosely organized
group of volunteers, and much more influenced from a vendor
standpoint." He lodged similar complaints about the support
model offered by Linux compared to SCO, and the lack of warranty
offered by many Linux distributions.
"Linux has a volunteer fire department support model,"
he said. "And volunteer fire departments can be great,
because you don't have to pay them -- but sometimes they're
just not there."
Despite the company's public objection to open source operating
systems, Erik Hughes, the company's senior director of product
management and strategic alliances addressed the company's
controversial inclusion of many open source applications with
its operating systems. Indeed, the company somewhat paradoxically
includes "hundreds, if not thousands" of open source
applications with its operating systems, including Web browsers,
database software and graphical environments. But Hughes said
there's a difference in the way SCO offers those applications,
and the way most Linux vendors offer those applications.
"The important thing is that we support it, we stand
behind and we will take a call and deliver fixes where they
are needed," Hughes said. "We stand behind it as
a complete offering, from the kernel, all the way up to the
app server and database server. Our open source strategy shouldn't
be a surprise to anybody."
McBride also called out Linux for lacking backward compatibility
from version to version, and for the forking of its code base,
pointing out two strengths for SCO -- its longtime stance
on backwards compatibility, often back to Xenix, and its much
newer position of codebase unification.
He also took shots at one Linux's longtime strongpoints in
comparison to Windows, its reliability, and said that one
major problem with the operating system was that it requires
too much tinkering, configuration and custom coding.
"If you like doing work on your operating system, that's
great," he said. "If you're rather focus on what
you do, on your competencies, we're there for you."
Also here at Forum, SCO introduced Tim Negris, formerly vice
president of marketing at Oracle, as its new senior vice president
of corporate marketing, and promoted engineering head Sandy
Gupta to the new position of CTO and vice president of engineering.
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