SCO Aims at Linux with SCAMP Stack

Published: March 16, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Struggling commercial Unix operating system distributor SCO Group has been fighting a two-front war for a number of years. On one front, the former Linux vendor (remember Caldera?) that bought the Santa Cruz Operation to bolster its position in Linux decided that rather than join Linux, it would fight it in the market with SCO's OpenServer and UnixWare Unixes. And at the same time, SCO decided that it would sue IBM for allegedly putting its Unix intellectual property into the open source Linux operating system and then got dragged into lawsuits with Novell and Red Hat.

While SCO has devoted tens of millions of dollars to the lawsuits, which it says it has to do to protect the Unix intellectual property and copyrights it acquired from Novell a number of years ago, and which Novell acquired from AT&T a few years before that, the company has also poured money into its OpenServer and UnixWare products in an effort to keep them modern. SCO is, in fact, in the process of gradually converging these product lines, a process that began with the launch of the "Legend" OpenServer 6 release last June, which has Unix System V Release 5 at its core. OpenServer 6 runs on dual-core X86 and X64 chips, but only in 32-bit mode. Because UnixWare 7 and OpenServer 6 are both based on the Unix SVR5 kernel, this means OpenServer 6 can run UnixWare applications as well as binaries created for the earlier releases of OpenServer. SCO's "Project Fusion" Unix release, which will be based on Unix System V Release 6, will, as the name suggests, offer a fully fused OpenServer-UnixWare product as well as 64-bit memory addressing and native support XML and probably Xen and VMware virtual machine partitions.

But as the Linux and Windows platforms demonstrate, there is more to selling an operating system than just selling an operating system. Customers buy software stacks these days, whether it is on a desktop or a PC. So this week, SCO is trying to position OpenServer 6 as a stack, with the advent of a formalized packaging of what it is calling the SCAMP Stack.

In the Linux world, the main thing that companies have been buying is the LAMP stack--which means Linux, plus the Apache Web server, the MySQL relational database, and the Perl/PHP/Python development toolset. (Ironically, the LAMP stack was the infrastructure part of the dot-com boom, while the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems and Oracle's 8i relational database was used for larger dot-coms and for back-end systems.) The popularity of Linux is in large measure due to the LAMP stack. So SCO wants to emulate this approach to packaging and speech.

Hence, the SCAMP Stack, which includes OpenServer 6 licenses, the Apache Web server (which is already in the operating system), a MySQL 5 database (which was recently certified on OpenServer 6 after a partnership with MySQL was hammered out last September), and the Perl and PHP development languages. (Python, for some reason, was not mentioned.) The big benefit is one-stop shopping and support. "Customers using the LAMP middleware stack are usually required to turn to multiple vendors for maintenance, updates and support," says Tim Negris, executive vice president of sales and marketing at SCO. "With SCAMP, SCO supports the entire stack." Well, this is true and not true. You can get an integrated support contract for the LAMP stack from Hewlett-Packard, which sells Linux licenses from Red Hat and Novell and can bundle on MySQL databases; there is no commercial support for Perl, and getting PHP support from anyone really requires you to get support from Zend Technologies. The Linux distros have basic support for the PHP engine, but if you want a real development environment, that is a different ballgame.

SCO is selling this SCAMP Stack for an entry price of $999 for five users, including support for MySQL. The SCO support for the stack includes MySQL upgrades through the MySQL Network for one year, two technical contacts (which may be SCO resellers), access to the SCO knowledge base and one-year of support, two phone or e-mail technical support incidents and unlimited access to Web tech support, and a maximum tech support response time of two days. This latter time seems a bit stingy. This $999 price is promotional, and it runs only through July 31. SCO did not say what the price would be after that.

That $999 price seems reasonable relative to the cost of Starter Edition of OpenServer 6, which all by its lonesome costs $599, including a license for two concurrent users running on a server with a single processor and up to 1 GB of main memory; if you scale any one of those items up, OpenServer 6 costs more. OpenServer Enterprise Edition will costs $1,399, and it supports 10 users, up to four processors, and up to 4 GB of main memory. Getting the basic level of support for one year for MySQL Network costs $595, so SCO customers are getting a few hundred bucks shaved off the cost of OpenServer 6 as part of the SCAMP bundle.

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