3 ms·

Per memory, Coherent 4.0 showed up around 1992-3, with TCP/IP and pseudoTTYs. X11 came along a little later. But by then it was too little too late: the Linux d

Per memory, Coherent 4.0 showed up around 1992-3, with TCP/IP and pseudoTTYs. X11 came along a little later. But by then it was too little too late: the Linux distros were already eating their lunch. Same with SCO. When I worked there circa 1991-95, the company lost $250 in license fee payments to assorted other companies for every complete copy of Open Desktop that they sold -- fees for the TCP/IP stack, the compiler, the AT&T license, the Motif skin, CDE, the IXI desktop ... even purchasing IXI didn't reduce it by much. They tried to go head-to-head with Windows NT as a workstation OS on the desktop and nearly broke the company, then backed off to focus on enterprise sales and support contracts. There was no way they could compete with a solid Linux as a desktop option after the late 1990s. And SCO was a much larger and more powerful company than Mark Williams (by 1991 they had about 1200 employees worldwide and $200M/year revenue -- going by memory).

justin66 6y ago
That is wild. I didn't know SCO was ever losing money in quite that way. I worked tech support for an early PC point of sale credit card payment processing company and Linux was actually one of the last *nixes we supported. I don't believe they had even rolled it out in 1998 when I quit. We supported DOS, Windows, SCO, and maybe one other commercial Unix with just a few users. It was excruciatingly obvious to the more knowledgeable rank and file where things were going, and I even wrote an internal document once explaining how to run the SCO version of our software on Linux using its iBCS support. The internal discussion I remember about which operating system we would support next as online payment processing took off was mostly about BSDI vs Linux (but with our upper management focused very strongly on NT). Perhaps oddly, both options were treated seriously.
- cstross 6y ago
  SCO wasn't losing money on sales -- IIRC their cheapest product at the time (bare-bones SysV 3.2 SCO UNIX) sold for upwards of $600 without the dev tools or extras: Open Desktop retailed for a minimum of $1200 in its most pared-back form -- but the $250 licensing fees put a floor under SCO that made it impossible for them to compete as a desktop OS for the general public, as opposed to enterprises that expected to spend $3000-4000 per seat on tech support and licensing for every employee, every year.

justin66 6y ago

That is wild. I didn't know SCO was ever losing money in quite that way. I worked tech support for an early PC point of sale credit card payment processing company and Linux was actually one of the last *nixes we supported. I don't believe they had even rolled it out in 1998 when I quit. We supported DOS, Windows, SCO, and maybe one other commercial Unix with just a few users. It was excruciatingly obvious to the more knowledgeable rank and file where things were going, and I even wrote an internal document once explaining how to run the SCO version of our software on Linux using its iBCS support. The internal discussion I remember about which operating system we would support next as online payment processing took off was mostly about BSDI vs Linux (but with our upper management focused very strongly on NT). Perhaps oddly, both options were treated seriously.

cstross 6y ago
SCO wasn't losing money on sales -- IIRC their cheapest product at the time (bare-bones SysV 3.2 SCO UNIX) sold for upwards of $600 without the dev tools or extras: Open Desktop retailed for a minimum of $1200 in its most pared-back form -- but the $250 licensing fees put a floor under SCO that made it impossible for them to compete as a desktop OS for the general public, as opposed to enterprises that expected to spend $3000-4000 per seat on tech support and licensing for every employee, every year.