Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

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 ...)

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" ...

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com