Did Microsoft guarantee BayStar's investment in SCO?

Ars Technica ^ | 10/8/2006 3:50:47 PM | Eric Bangeman

[antiRepublicrat]

You can't even admit that this guy made an idiot mistake.

I admit he made a big mistake. He took a gamble with possible returns in the nine or ten figures, and lost. A lot of people, including some on this board, believed SCO's hype about how strong a case they had.

[Golden Eagle]

AntiRepublic here so hates Microsoft he's willing to give IBM a free pass on them breaking their agreement with SCO to help develop the next Unix on Intel, and ruined them by helping flood the market with free Linux instead. They almost destroyed the entire US Unix market in the process, but thankfully it is recovering.

But there is justice in the world, despite his hate antiRepublic here has to work on M$ systems for a living! Is that not funny or what.

[WildBill2275]

Can someone explain why IBM would get into a deal with SCO?
They already had AIX (their UNIX variant).
HP had their high availability variant (HPSUX)(thats real marketing).
Linux was already a viable OS.
(I had two SPARCs in my office, one with SUN OS (Open Look) one with Linux, and a Windoz piece of junk).
SCO and SUN were (are) both Berkley variants

As far as anyone in IT not liking MS: They produce a sloppy product. They (last I knew) would not certify their OS (?) for mission critical applications. Too unstable or just afraid of litigation. I still get BSOD on my eXtremely Poor (XP) SP 2 laptop.

On the other hand, Linux is the OS of choice on the international space station. (The only thing France pushed for that made sense.)

[Golden Eagle]

At the time SCO owned about 50% of the overall Unix business and 100% of the Unix on Intel business.

[antiRepublicrat]

AntiRepublic here so hates Microsoft he's willing to give IBM a free pass on them breaking their agreement with SCO to help develop the next Unix on Intel

Why do they even need a pass? Unless they're under contract to stick with it, a company is free to abandon projects when they see better prospects. I never complained on any terms but technical (use of the inferior Win3.x API) that Microsoft dropped the collaboration with IBM over OS2/NT.

They almost destroyed the entire US Unix market in the process

They helped the market, with Linux. For one, because of Linux there are now a LOT more UNIX apps out there. Linux helped boost the sagging popularity of UNIX due to the increased capabilities of Microsoft's products.

But there is justice in the world, despite his hate antiRepublic here has to work on M$ systems for a living!

Not has to, choose to. I get very little of the administration headache, and get to have fun with .NET 2.0 all the time. Although 1.1 was quite headache-inducing, I could see the promise, which was mostly fulfilled in 2.0.

Quit projecting your philosophical software views onto me.

And learn my name, lead turkey.

[antiRepublicrat]

Can someone explain why IBM would get into a deal with SCO?

Project Monterey was a collaboration to build the one united UNIX that would run on most popular platforms, something that had never before succeeded. The Santa Cruz Operation's (NOT the current lawsuit mill that is SCO) part in it was to provide expertise for the x86 architecture. The project quickly died to various problems in the UNIX market.

Caldera/The SCO Group (the company currently suing) bought the UNIX business from the Santa Cruz Operation just before Project Monterey died, and kept up the UNIX and Linux businesses, even attempting to merge the two in ways. Then they hired a new CEO who decided to turn the company into a lawsuit mill.

[WildBill2275]

Thanks.
I had forgotten about that.
I was spoiled with a 3B2 300 at home and access to a PC with SVr386 as well as many other toys.
This is off the point but AT&T made a big mistake by trying to use UNIX to sell proprietary hardware rather than selling UNIX for putty colored breadboxes as a product.
Not to mention that Open Look was always a better and more network efficient standard for GUI than Motif.
(ex AT&T Computer Systems Group and AT&T Labs.)

[antiRepublicrat]

This is off the point but AT&T made a big mistake by trying to use UNIX to sell proprietary hardware rather than selling UNIX for putty colored breadboxes as a product.

UNIX vendors have always made most of their money off of hardware and support contracts, relatively little on actually licensing the product (unless the license included support). That's why Linux fits in well with its support-only business model.