My brother-in-law used to have a seafood restaurant in San Jose. Often he'd wear an amusing but cryptic t-shirt with a picture of hands extended upward toward a glowing fish. The copy on the shirt said "Fish worship. Is it wrong?"
Thinking about that shirt puts me in the surreal frame of mind that seems to be required for making any kind of sense out of what happened to SCO.
A few months back, SCO seemed to be a resourceful survivor, managing to quietly combine the has-been (its UNIX business) with the won't-be (its Linux business) and looking at least somewhat credible in the process. Its revenues were quietly sliding away, from $17.9 million in the quarter ending in January 2002 to 13.5 million in the same quarter, one year later. More significantly, its cash had fallen from $26.1 million to $4.9 million. Dying, perhaps, but a long way from dead.
<http://www.hoovers.com/quarterlies/9/0,2167,99709,00.html>
Then, out of nowhere, they went batty over intellectual property, of all things. They sued IBM for $1 billion for violating something or other. Then they claimed to to find hunks of orthodox UNIX code leveraged into Linux somehow (though at this writing they still haven't offered the evidence). Unwilling to sue themselves, they "suspended" their Linux business and warned Linux users about the "potential liability that could rest with them for using such software" while offering to "hold harmless" their own remaining Linux customers.
As if all that stuff weren't wacky enough, Microsoft just licensed SCO's UNIX source code and patents (even though, when our own Don Marti went looking for SCO patents a couple months back, he couldn't find any). <http://www.ssc.com/pipermail/atc/2003-March/000034.html>
The best legal work so far on the case appears to have been done by Eric Raymond and Rob Landley of the Open Source Initiative. <http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html> ESR's fighting spirit and gift for rhetoric are put to fine use in a position paper that takes apart SCO's case against IBM, almost phrase by phrase. Here's just one of its withering statements:
SCO's complaint is factually defective in that it implies claims about SCO's business and technical capabilities that are untrue. It is, indeed, very cleverly crafted to deceive a reader without intimate knowledge of the technology and history of Unix; it gives false impressions by both the suppression of relevant facts, the ambiguous suggestion of falsehoods, and in a few instances by outright lying.
Meanwhile, IBM remains as solid and passive as Stonehenge. Which is maybe the way it should be. Microsoft gets a few digs against Linux. SCO will lose. Life will go on.
On a more producive note, Sun on Monday announced agreements with Oracle and Red Hat that promise to gain the company some of the leverage those two companies currently enjoy around the market's appetite for Linux in the Enterprise.
<http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/lowcostcomputing/>
<http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-05/sunflash.20030519.6.html>
<http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-05/sunflash.20030519.4.html>
The press releases tell the usual story, which is fine. I tried to get a bit past the PR through an email exchange with Laura Finkelstein, group marketing manager, entry servers, Sun Microsystems. Here's how it went:
Q: What can you tell us about the growth and change of the Linux market in enterprises that we're not hearing already? What I'm getting from customers, mostly, is news about cost. They want to cheap out, basically. That means white boxes or Dell boxes. What's the sell against that imperative?
A: Customers do want to lower their costs. But they want to also be guaranteed high performance with high quality. What Sun is delivering is high quality and performance offerings at a low price.
We intend to maintain a pricing model that continues to keep Sun competitive with Dell. For customers who only care about price, we're pricing it below Dell. For customers who want more than what Dell can offer, we're also offering enterprise-class solutions still below the cost of Dell systems.
Q: Who's the competition here?
A: Dell, HP, IBM
Q: Oracle has been highly aggressive about Linux, essentially shifting their OS focus from agnosticism to Faith in the Penguin. They are also quick to respond to customer requests for deployments on Linux (I hear from customers that Oracle is the one vendor that has its Linux act together). Are we going to see anything like that from Sun? Or anything that follows on Oracle's leadership here? I wonder because I'm told that what customers are doing is moving Oracle from expensive Sun servers to cheap Dells or no-names. Hard to tell exactly what Sun's response would be. Maybe you can elaborate.
A: We will be delivering a Linux solution primarily to what you're describing about Oracle's. We have systems, software, solutions and services and we will be the single source to ease the customer experience for Linux, x86 and Oracle.
As you saw yesterday, Sun and Oracle are committed to delivering low cost solutions. Sun is dedicated to delivering Linux and customers can choose whatever Linux platform they would like to run on these new platforms.
Q: How will the rubber of this agreement (with Red Hat) meet the road? Will your salespeople or tech folks go out together on calls? Will you send each other business? Or is this just an agreement to distribute each other's stuff?
A: Sun presents customers with value, innovation and choice. Sun's sales force will be able to offer Red Hat as a service. What this agreement is about is providing customers a single interface. It allows two important things:
1. A customer to run Red Hat on their product and get full global enterprise support from Sun with the assurance that any problems can be solved on Red Hat through Sun;
2. Customers can receive their hardware, software, support and services through one source: Sun.Also, Sun is really excited that Red Hat is distributing Sun's Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with all versions of Red Hat software, extending the reach and influence of the world's most popular application environment. It's a real benefit for both the Linux and Java developer communities.
Q: Are any of these deals exclusive? (The main thing I'm interested in hearing is stuff about what's happening on the customer side, the demand side, that's new and different and significant. I got that last fall from Sun when I was told about the popularity of Linux white boxes among "transaction workers." I hadn't heard that term before, and suddenly a lot of other input made sense. I'm looking for the same kind of thing again.)
A: No.
Q: By the way, how is the Linux desktop program going?
A: With regards to Project Mad Hatter and our plans for the Linux desktop, we continue to make solid progress on our efforts to deliver an open enterprise desktop platform later this year. Designed specifically as an alternative solution for customers seeking a 3-5x savings over current desktop installations, we are excited by the feedback we are getting from customers and partners on our direction.
At this point in time, however, we are not at liberty to discuss specifics around the OS distribution or specific elements of the solution. Stay tuned.
Okay, it still has the sound of PR, but I've gotta give them props for at least responding to the questions.
Last but not least, I'm headed to New York this weekend to check out the public wi-fi situation there, and how it's being deployed with Linux. If you have any input on that, I'd love to hear from you.