What are the Garage Effects of SCO's FUD?
In my work for Linux Journal, I've avoided SCO stories, for two reasons. First, I think SCO's sue-everybody strategy is a scam. (See Groklaw for details out the wazoo.) And second, because too many other people are alredy on the case. (Google finds over a million results to a SCO stories search.)
But I'm interested now in a side to the story that I don't hear much about, which is the effect of SCO's FUD on the innards of IT. How much has all the FUD effected the guys and gals who just need to get stuff done? Has it driven open source use, and development, underground? Has it mostly just put a knot in the shorts of the legal departments but not much else?
I'm interested in real stories here, and not just general beliefs. I have one so far: an IT architect from a major telco who was told by the company legal department not to speak on a panel I moderated a couple months back. (Out of kindness to him, though not his company, I won't name either here.)
I'm especially interested in the effects, if any, on IT garage hands whose work involves development of open source code. Has that been discouraged by SCO's FUD? If so, this has effects beyond the IT organization: it slows the building of common infrastructure on which whole markets are built.
Feel free to add your remarks here, or to send an email to docATssc.com.
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SCO FUD
This is Erik Engbrecht - Did I mention I haven't received my password yet?
Anyway, I work at a Fortune 100 corporation. There was an engineering analysis application (or something of the sort) that one of our design groups decided they needed, and I believe Linux it either only ran on Linux, or it ran on Linux and Windows, but was useless on Windows due to memory limitations of some sort. The deployment of the app was delayed while until we confirmed we had indemnification from potential SCO lawsuits through one of our server vendor.
I'm not sure how much of it was anti-Linux sentiments, and how much of it was genuine concern about lawsuits. Probably a little of both, because I know there are anit-Linux people, and I know people in our company tend to be very conservative about that sort of thing.
Which makes a DIY-not really IT but technology point come to mind. We do a lot of embedded/real-time systems development. I know we have advanced tech people looking into using Linux instead of proprietary OSes - both because it's free and because it gives us the opportunity to play with the OS.
SCO's FUD
I just got a programming Associates (at 47). Right now I'm working at a White Box store as a tech and sales clerk. Jobs are starting to open up in NC but no great ones for entry level yet. I'm also writing a payroll program to run on Linux, on the side (it seems to be the missing piece in business software). I mention Linux to customers regularly, especially the ones that just paid $100.00+ to get spy/ad/malware removed from their PC's. Very few average users have heard of SCO, I've only been asked by 2 of the last 40 people. In the last 2 weeks I've done two Suse installs and one RedHat. I think thats promising. What about you?
SCO? who?
As an implementer/garagehand (IT at a University frequently means that low-cost/no-retail-cost is the only option), I haven't noticed any effect of the FUDnoise from SCO on projects people are planning here. Many servers are based on OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but that was the case before as well, so I can't say it's made much difference. People are not shying away from Open Source projects as resources to get things done, though.
Scott Delinger