After enduring a year of personal attacks by the IT
industry, SCO chief executive Darl McBride pledged to continue the
company's legal battle with IBM renewed its commitment to
modernising its own Unix platforms.
"The pressure applied by IBM and its agents is brutal," McBride
said, describing the stress he has endured as a result of the
lawsuit over the past year.
SCO launched a lawsuit last year against IBM, claiming the
company had breached its Unix contract by contributing Unix System
V code to the Linux project. The case is set to go to trial in Utah
on 1 November 2005.
McBride admitted he had not expected the year to be so tough and
as part of his strategy to cope with the stress he has decided to
own some of the unflattering nicknames he's been given.
These include "the most dangerous man in IT", "Mr. Unpopular",
and "corporate enemy number one".
It was by these nicknames that he was introduced to the stage at
this year's SCO Forum, with one addition: "Defender of Unix".
SCO's lawsuit against IBM could have serious repercussions for
Linux users. If SCO wins Linux users could be found to be
infringing upon SCO's intellectual property unless they pay SCO a
licence fee.
Since SCO introduced its licence fee it has sold fewer than 100,
McBride said, but he claims that revenue from the SCOsource
division, which is responsible for the SCO intellectual property
licence, will be up considerably when SCO announces its third
quarter results in coming weeks.
Second quarter results showed SCOsource revenue at $11,000
(£6,042) but McBride said third quarter's revenue will "be in the
six figure range".
Also, SCO is still confident it will win the lawsuit, despite
opposition from most of the IT industry.
"The only reason I would pursue such a difficult cause is
because I believe in it," he said during a keynote speech.
He predicts that if SCO wins the lawsuit, the IT industry will
support both the decision and SCO. "Once we win they will see that
Big Blue has big problems," McBride said.
Despite the hostility from much of the IT industry, SCO has at
least one analyst on its side - Rob Enderle, founder and principal
analyst of the Enderle Group.
Enderle cautioned users to be wary of the costs associated with
free software and encouraged people to try to look at both sides of
the SCO/IBM lawsuit before passing judgment.
However, he admits to being prejudiced against IBM and is
steadfast in his support for both SCO and Microsoft. "Sometimes
being on the right side is not being on the popular side," he
said.
Enderle, a former IBM auditor, said he has little confidence in
IBM's integrity. But, more importantly, he said that he has seen
the disputed code.
When the lawsuit against IBM was first launched, Enderle said he
made a particular effort to meet SCO and view the evidence. The
result: he believes SCO has a case. Eventually he resigned from
Forrester Research, which had instructed him not to publicly
discuss the SCO suit.
Meanwhile, it also appears as if one of SCO's largest Canadian
customers is losing confidence in the company. In fact, Shoppers
Drug Mart's SCO Forum attendee said it even has a contingency plan
to move to Linux, should SCO lose its legal battle.
Shoppers Drug Mart has been an SCO customer since 1989, using
its operating system to run about 800 locations.
In 1989 it started out with SCO's OpenServer 3 and in 2000 the
company switched to SCO's flagship product, UnixWare 7.1.1.
Now Shoppers Mart is migrating to the latest version of
UnixWare, 7.1.4 because support for 7.1.1 is coming to an end, said
Ian McMaster, manager of store technical services.
If Shoppers had had more time to devise another migration plan
it would already be off SCO's UnixWare and onto Linux. In fact, it
has a plan in place to move to Linux in 2005 if SCO wins the
lawsuit and third party support for UnixWare does not improve,
McMaster said.
McMaster said Shoppers has been satisfied with UnixWare's
performance and reliability but is concerned about the platform's
lack of third-party support and what will become of SCO if it loses
its IBM suit.
For example, Shoppers uses IBM's Informix Dynamic Server
database, which does not support UnixWare and it uses products from
Dialogic Communications which also do not support UnixWare. BEA
Systems only certified its application server for UnixWare after
Shoppers paid it tens of thousands of dollars for it to do so,
McMaster said.
"To me SCO seem to be staying afloat and that means you have to
look at alternatives," he said. "The IBMs, the BEAs and the
Dialogics are pushing SCO down to a tier three supplier. We need a
tier-one or a tier-two supplier that will do current ports and
certification. We listen to vendors and watch their roadmaps and
when SCO disappears that will be a signal [to move on]."
But McMaster was not happy about the prospect of abandoning SCO.
He described the company's heyday in the mid-1990s and the fervor
with which the company once sold its products.
"They were a dynamic bunch and they had the same energy that
Linux has today," he said. "I just think they blew it. Its chief
executives were misguided and they never recovered."
He also expressed sadness about the company's potential demise.
"It was a great company all through the 1990s," he said. "It had
the market in replicated sites and there were allegiances we formed
over the years. It's hard to think about losing them."
But SCO is determined to hang on and has dedicated itself to
modernising its line of products. It has announced a developer
preview of the next release of OpenServer, dubbed Legend. SCO is
hoping that Legend will increase the number of applications
available for SCO's OpenServer.
SCO's vice-president of engineering, Sandy Gupta, said Legend
has a 100% increase in file system speed, updated Java support and
an average of more than 20,000 hours of uptime before a reboot is
required. Legend will ship in the first quarter of 2005.
The company also announced its SCO Marketplace initiative, which
lets developers bid online for development work. Those who win the
bid will be paid by SCO for their development efforts. Marketplace
is not yet live but SCO promised to release more information
soon.
SCO also introduced its latest effort to develop a 64-bit Unix,
Project Diamond. Diamond will be available in 2006. And it has
released SCOoffice Server 4.1, which it touts as an alternative to
Microsoft's Exchange server.
It has e-mail virus and junk mail filtering capabilities along
with secure e-mail access. It includes collaboration tools for
scheduling meetings, sharing contact lists and folders. It also
supports Microsoft Outlook, Qualcomm's Eudora and Netscape, and can
be enabled for remote access.
Rebecca Reid writes for ITWorldCanada.com