John wrote to All at 00:53 25 Dec:


 JD> Lately I've come to have a subjective impression that on anything
 JD> less then  'big iron', most of the sco, solaris, at&t, ultrix, etc
 JD> boxes have been replaced by open source running on generic intel
 JD> hardware.  (or maybe that's a separate question?)

I think that's a fair assessment, John.

Prior to the Caldera purchase of SCO, and the concurrent growth of freeBSDs
and Linux on Intel, SCO OpenServer had about an 80% market share. Caldera
did a great job of tanking that market share.

Sun was the only other company that even produced a 'big iron' Unix for
Intel, but they alienated a good percentage of that interest with their
games over Solaris 9. What damage was done may be difficult to recover.
I've never actually run Solaris on Intel, but I do own several personal
license copies. I'm still considering whether I'll pay $99 for Solaris 9 on
Intel -- the previous copies were all FREE.

As for Caldera/SCO, it seems they're backtracking, have restored the
"SCO" name, and are going to refocus on the "commercial unix
on Intel" market. It remains to be seen whether they'll be successful.

Where I think the significant potential market exists is in the reclaiming
of all of the gazillions of Pentium(tm) class computers that are worthless
for Windows, but work just as good today as they did 7 years ago as a
departmental Unix server.



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