[Talk] Re: [Linux-aus] SCO position, rationale and AUUG

[Andrew Rutherford]

At 6:05 PM +0930 22/5/03, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

>  > Bear in mind that one of the reasons that (I was told) Sun went
>>  System V for Solaris was because of the fact that the SunOS BSD
>>  kernel didn't MP anywhere near as well as System V
>
>So they say, at least nowadays.  I find that hard to believe, given
>that at the time (System V.3(.0)) it didn't have *any* support for
>SMP.  That didn't come until the early 1990s.

At the time (I still have some old Sun press releases for amusements 
sake, plus some email conversations with Sun employees at the time), 
Sun were trying to get more of a focus and business and less in 
education/engineering, and believed that SysV had a much greater 
following in the business world (were they thinking about SCO? That 
would be a great irony!), and having a system based on code generally 
thought to be made by "tinkerers" rather than "software 
professionals" would be a hindrance in their push into the high-end 
business market.

>  >>> We also note that Microsoft have dropped support for some of their
>  >>> software on SCO UNIX, but support those programs on Linux.

Given the aforementioned tiff between Microsoft and SCO, with SCO 
removing their Xenix code which was there to support Microsoft, is it 
any wonder that Microsoft dropped support? Even if just to prove a 
point - "they removed support for our code, so we're not coding for 
their platform any more."

-- 
Andrew Rutherford      sip:andrewr at iagu.net      244 Pirie Street
Iagu Networks          tel:+61-8-8425-2255       Adelaide SA 5000
http://www.iagu.net/   mailto:andrewr at iagu.net   Australia