SCO is finally “Dead Parrot” dead | Hacker News Reader

SCO is finally “Dead Parrot” dead

zdnet.com

73 pointstanglesome45 comments

Sigh. Circa 1991-95, when SCO was a real UNIX company -- revenues of $200M/year, the most popular vendor of UNIX for i386, not suing anyone -- I worked in techpubs with the group doing core OS development. There go some interesting memories.

(The SCO we all know and hate is actually the rump of Caldera, a Linux vendor established around 1995 with capital from Ray Noorda, based in Utah. Caldera got into the habit of litigation by buying the rump of Digital Research -- inventors of CP/M -- and inheriting their lawsuit against Microsoft for locking Windows 95 down so it wouldn't run on DR-DOS. They cleaned up to the tune of around $500M, but still burned through their capital without overcoming SuSE or Red Hat, at which point they bought most of SCO (the rest became a middleware vendor) and tried to do it again. Only this time they picked on IBM and Novell, and the rest is history ...)

(Did I say "hate"? That's four years of my resume that's a toxic exclusion zone, thanks to those shysters ...)

Your employment with them does not reflect on you professionally or personally. You should list the work you did while employed for them and be proud of it. There's no shame in doing that.

SCO really is toxic in a lot of circles, and most people don't remember the real history.

I'll bet that he could get away with describing his time at the "Santa Cruz Operation", though, for the same reason.

I would probably just say Tarantella.

He is Charlie Stross. He doesn't need a resumé.

cstross has had a bit of a career change since then. I suspect he'll be okay.

I would be leery hiring anybody associated with SCO. I'm not saying that it would be a "No-Hire" - but it is a big red flag would involve a lot of questions. It's far enough back now, that I would not mention them on your resume (Typically resumes don't include every company you've ever worked for) unless you were applying for a position that requires "100% disclosure" of all companies you've been associated with. cstross, though, is one of the few people who has told the SCO story in a way that it probably might not hurt him too much... In general - just agreeing that what they did was bad, might be enough in most "Side of Light" companies.

On the flip side - if you are applying for a job at a Patent troll (Side of darkness) - then maybe a person's time at SCO might be a bonus?

SCO really is a very, very toxic company - and there are a number of senior managers of that company that I wouldn't eat dinner with, and certainly would never shake their hands. The way I explain it to my friends - As Enron was to manipulating markets and shady financials, SCO was to open source software. Good riddance, one of the very few companies I'm happy to see die.

Under UK employment law, there's a precedent that says that, just as an ex-employee shouldn't libel their former employer, employers have a duty not to bring their former staff's resume into disrepture. I'm told by a barrister of my acquaintance that if I was still working in IT, and SCO was still doing business in the UK, I'd have a reasonable claim against them in court ...

(The precedent was set when former employees of BCCI sued that bank in the wake of its collapse in the 1990s. They cleaned up.)

I think we all agree with you about the recent incarnation of SCO, but the point is that the original SCO was a perfectly legitimate business.

Perfectly legitimate and pretty awesome, even.

Ah - that point got by me, Sorry. Now, the challenge is, on your resume (in this, and any other situation) is to differentiate between when the company was wonderful, and did good things, and when it was under new management, and, to capture how long you stuck around under the new management.

For example - I wonder if there was a time that Enron was a great company as well?

Useful employees lest tSCOg years and years ago. Only a few executives and book keepers worked there. And an outside trustee was brought in as well.

I guess one take away is don't hire Davide Boise law firm.

That's silly. Anyone who worked at SCO was gone before Dark McBride took the paper shell of the corporation to court.

Maybe not anymore but at the time SCO was laying off employees (2007), there were a bunch of posts saying how whatever person/company wouldn't be hiring them or in general that they wouldn't get hired. It probably had an effect on some of them.

No. SCO circa 1986-89, back when they had the hot tub, and the engineering room was officially clothing optional after business hours... that's when they were a real Unix company.

Yeah, I arrived at the tail end of that culture, just before the first big axe-swinging in late 1991/early 1992, and the subsequent IPO.

Some memoirs: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/06/how_i_go...

I was reading it, reading it further, it was a fun story, and suddenly --

IBM Staff Handbook

1.2 cuils.

Back in 1996 I used to maintain a custom device driver for SCO OpenDesktop (which we actually used as a server). The actual userland software was mostly written in Perl 4.036.

I still remember space.c and the "hidden" compiler we used to bootstrap gcc, plus relinking when the IP address had to change. I kept the original documentation around (lots of interesting books) and have a "/u" zfs mountpoint just for memories' sake. We also used an IPX client to access Netware but I can't remember the name[0].

We wrote a stupid daemon that would die each time you pressed DEL on the console, possibly because we had no clues about proper daemons back then. All in all, it was kind of fun :)

EDIT:

[0] Netcon!

BTW the correct technical term is "resume stain" (care of Scott Adams).

I'm also a long time SCO person, although I was working for IXI in Cambridge and we had virtually nothing to do with the SCO Unix side - well over 90% of our business was on RISC platforms. I did actually meet you once, although you won't remember :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IXI_Limited

I will say that the techpubs group at SCO did a heck of a lot of work. SCO Unix distinguished itself from other Unix versions by being very friendly, even for administrators. In theory you could do everything from the GUI. And of course that also meant comprehensive usable documentation. SCO was the first company to license the NCSA Mosaic browser, with SCO's techpubs group using it for online help. In IXI we went way further than that, including adding scripting (TCL) and making it possible to combine help and preferences.

Many people do not know how SCO's business worked. When computers were a lot more expensive (think fridge sized boxes with a minimum cost of $100k) they weren't practical for small businesses (eg a dentist's office). There were 15,000 VARs who you could call if you were a small business and they'd bring in a several thousand dollar computer (typically Compaq), some terminals, tape backup system, the operating system (SCO) and software for managing the office. Since they usually charged a percentage of the goods, it didn't matter if the Unix cost $1,000. It was that side of things Caldera wanted to get into, rather than selling for $19 a copy at a store.

For many years if you wanted to run a pet cemetery, then the only management software was on SCO Unix.

Yeah. We ate our own dogfood, too: when I joined, Techpubs in Watford was running on a single PC -- a 33MHz 386DX with 32Mb of RAM -- and a Stallion OnBoard smart serial card (with its own 286 to drive the 32(!) RS232 serial ports) to talk to the Wyse-70 on each employee's desk. 9600 baud taught you to use vi, and use it efficiently -- it took a whole second per screen refresh -- but we had a team of 15 people working productively on that one PC.

Yes, we were managing that 30,000 page documentation set using sccs, vi, and troff, with a custom (sco.mac) set of macros that forked off of the Xenix version of man.mac some time back in the 1980s and that had been hacked about to support semantic tagging because "we're upgrading to SGML next year" ...

Time at the original SCO shouldn't be a stain on any resume.

Maybe there should be an asterisk placed on any new company that buys another company and takes their name. I can think of a few examples: Caldera buys SCO, SBC buying AT&T, Rackable Systems buying SGI.

Really though, out of those, only the SCO buyout was really a toxic change.

It was Win 3.1 that had the AARD code that locked out DR-DOS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

Caldera's buyout of SCO seems crazy in hindsight.

As I understood the business, SCO made millions off channel sales. For instance, getting 10k out of a 100k deal made between a local VAR and a customer.

Caldera made millions off of going into SCO customer sites and cutting out either the VAR, SCO, or both. For instance, turn a 100k recurring cost into a 10k one.

When Caldera bought SCO, it found itself with two extremely successful, wholly incompatible business models under the same roof. What were they thinking?

Where are they now?

Darl McBride (CEO of SCO): "Me, Inc" http://www.linkedin.com/pub/darl-mcbride/0/889/95b

Chris Sonntag (Sr. VP @ SCO): AWOL (There's a Sonntag at Franklin Templeton, and a few others elsewhere).

Blake Stowell (PR at SCO): Analyst Relations at Adobe Systems http://www.linkedin.com/in/blakestowell

(Way to keep it classy, Adobe).

Maureen O'Gara (very SCO-friendly "analyst") Sys-Con Media: http://maureenogara.sys-con.com/

David Politis (columnist, Utah Tech Watch, and marketing/communications consultant): CMO ISYS Technologies and Xi3 Corporation (subsidiary of ISYS), as well as CEO of his own consultancy Politis Communications. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-politis/0/36/a59

Ralph Yarro (Chairman @ SCO): CEO/Chairman, ThinkAtomic http://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphyarro

Jeff Hunsacker (President & COO, Sr. VP/GM, Sr VP WW Sales, VP Sales/Marketing, @ SCO): President, US Operations, UK2 Group http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jeff-hunsaker/1/70/7a8

Joe Barr, LinuxWorld columnist (heavily critical/skeptical of SCO) passed away in 2008: http://archive09.linux.com/feature/141548

Is Dan Lyons still at Forbes?

According to his Wikipedia page, he's at NewsWeek now.

I don't particularly hold a grudge against Lyons as he recanted his pro-SCO stance pretty much totally: http://www.forbes.com/2007/09/19/software-linux-lawsuits-tec...

O'Gara, Politis, and DiDio are different animals (Laura's now principle of her own consultancy as well: http://itic-corp.com/).

And I keep having to check myself from not transposing the 'l' and 'u' in "consult" ....

Thanks for this list!

Phew, things move awful slow in the world! I remember when this broke (in like, 2005?). It was HUGE news on Slashdot - many of the comments were along the lines of "This fud will be killed, and SCO will be dead in months.". And here we are, 7 YEARS later!

It always amounts to: "SCO will be dead in N months where N is a number greater than zero."

Well, typically you stop using "months" once you've gone beyond a year or so. I tell people my kid is 5 years old... not 64 months. To say something will be gone "in months" would imply you think it will be less than a year... not 7 years.

What you're remembering is that, in 2007, they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, in which an insolvent company tries to rebuild its finances to avoid bankruptcy.

Apparently that failed, and they're now actually filing for bankruptcy.

And IBM still has not had its day in court to defend against the outrageous claim they stole code.

Also remember, Novell sold a bunch of IP to Attachmate or some such company -- yes Microsoft's finger prints were on the deal.

1. Remember that this is TSG, not SCO.

2. Not dead yet. Khan might even continue as trustee.

pj at Groklaw.net breaks it down:

"I will try my best to translate the legalese for you: the money is almost all gone, so it's not fun any more. SCO can't afford Chapter 11. We want to shut the costs down, because we'll never get paid. But it'd look stupid to admit the whole thing was ridiculous and SCO never had a chance to reorganize through its fantasy litigation hustle. Besides, Ralph Yarro and the other shareholders might sue. So they want the litigation to continue to swing in the breeze, just in case. But SCO has no money coming in and no other prospects, so they want to proceed in a cheaper way and shut this down in respects to everything else.

I guess that will mean there is little chance of IBM or anyone else seeing a dime ever for all the torts and wrongs SCO perpetrated on IBM and Linux and its debtors. The lawyers and professionals, including the firm representing the Chapter 11 trustee, got it all. Now that there is no more, off we go to Chapter 7. "

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120807133033596

SCO was a one trick pony. IV has taken its place.

IV is actually much more toxic. SCO was a failure at being an IP troll. IV actually successfully shakes people down every day for protection money. SCO also actually had products at one point in time (not even bad ones, honestly, if you go back far enough).

too young to remember that sco even made products hehe

I agree with you about IV, which is the reason why I mention it. The time for celebration after a victory is typically short lived.

I did a couple years of contract work on SCO systems, doing migration to Linux systems. SCO UNIX wasn't awful. It wasn't good, at least not when compared to Linux (which was really solid and powerful by that time, I think we were moving to RHEL 2), but it wasn't bad, either. Extremely reliable, anyway. There was probably a way for them to build on their strengths and embrace the new Open Source reality, but they obviously missed it.

cstross has written some interesting stuff about his time at SCO, linked elsewhere in this discussion. I found it a good read.

- ... there's really is much for a trustee to do ...

- ... in the early and mid-200s ...

What the hell happened to ZDNet? That article has a few typos. Do they not have anyone proof read things?

I like to think I contributed in some small way to their demise. My publisher sued SCO on my behalf while the IBM stuff was going on, and settled for a reasonable sum.

"dont let the door hit you on the way out" - old slashdot unix nerd me.

I'll believe SCO are dead when Netcraft confirms it.

To all the "haters" on this thread, I will simply say this:

Senator, I worked with Darl McBride. I knew Darl McBride. Darl McBride was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Darl McBride.

:-)

Current state of SCO = future for Microsoft

Nope. Apple.

First, SCO. Next, Apple.

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