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01.08.07
Any Hope For SCO?
 By
A.P. Lawrence
SCO's stock price sank and sank and recently they've been delisted: you can't buy their stock on NASDAQ anymore (though it's hard to imagine why you would want to - you'd need a lot of faith and hope to be chasing this rabbit!).
Although I still have clients clinging to SCO (mostly reluctantly - they are stuck with a SCO-only application), most of the crowd is running off the sinking ship as fast as their little feet can carry them. I don't currently know anyone who still works at SCO, but I can't imagine it's a happy place right now. Prospects are dismal at best..
Some of the jumpers are moving to Windows.. that's sad, but I really think they'll be back on Linux or Mac inside of a decade.. I think Microsoft has run its course and is teetering and getting ready to crumble.. Linux and Mac are going to eat up the computing world.. or at least that's how I see it.
So is there any hope for SCO at all? I believe that there is, but it would be a big gamble and a big leap of faith. I think they need to go Open Source.
No, I don't mean Caldera Linux. I mean open up OpenServer 6
and let the cards fall where they may. Make money with consulting and by designing products like mail servers, web servers and so
on that are tightly tied to the OS. Oh, all open source, of course,
but integrate it so that it would be very hard to port elsewhere and get the same performance. In my opinion, that's the secret to
open source: be open but let your expertise be your competitive edge. Who knows more about RedHat than RedHat? Who'd know more about SCO 6 Open? Who could write the best performing apps, who could best leverage the large (dwindling, but still large) SCO user base? The answer is plain: SCO themselves are in the best position.
This would be a risk, but it might fly. SCO OpenServer 6 really does have a lot to offer, and of course opening it up could only make it better. Yes, I'm sure that there would be difficult licensing issues: some code might even have to be pulled if the owners are too stupid and greedy to see that this is their only hope. But since SCO already has a working, non-open system, lacking some code isn't critical: that stuff could be replaced later.
Would SCO stockholders consider this? I don't know - I don't know how technically savvy most are. I don't even know how much of SCO itself is still technically savvy - those folks may be mostly gone. But in my opinion, this is the only chance (small as it is) for SCO to survive. The ONLY chance.
Disclaimer: I do own some small amount of SCO stock. Not much, I sold most of it at a nice profit years ago. But I did pick up a few shares before it sank out of sight, just on the near impossible chance that they do something like this.
Comments
*Originally published at APLawrence.com
About the Author:
A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com
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