SCO Getting Back to Its Application Roots

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Before Linux became a viable alternative to Unix, before Windows became an enterprise-class operating system, and when NetWare was the popular platform on which small businesses put their core applications, Santa Cruz Operation had a tidy little business selling Unix variants for X86 servers that were a key component of turnkey applications. Millions of customers were using Unix and didn't even know it. Now The SCO Group wants to recultivate wants to boost its OpenServer and UnixWare business by getting back to its application roots.

That's what the SCO Marketplace is all about, which SCO officially rolled out this week. At SCO's user conference in August, the company said that it was launching SCO Marketplace by the end of the year, to pay developers outside of the company to work on improvements to the OpenServer and UnixWare platforms. SCO and coders will work out the schedules and pricing for such work, and the company has still not said exactly what the bidding and pricing process will be. The SCO Marketplace initiative will be delivered through the SCO Developer Network, and I just signed up so I can eventually get a look at it. (If they let me in, that is.)

SCO says it has over 11,000 resellers, which, collectively, have over 4,000 developers, which means there is a very large amount of brain power and coding experience that the company can bring to bear on creating better Unix platforms today and, in the future, better applications for those Unixes. Any registered, authorized, or premier SCO partner is eligible to participate in the SCO Marketplace, and developers who are not already partners can register and participate in the initiative as well. Right now, SCO is just primarily focused on getting developers to join the marketplace and to start bidding on Unix work. But it has larger aspirations for this particular SCO Unix community.

SCO would love to see the SCO Marketplace be the means through which the vast installed base of SCO turnkey applications become modernized away from an ASCII terminal approach, typified by Unix development in the early 1990s, to a more Internet-friendly Web-style interface. This is exactly the same sort of transformation that applications running on proprietary midrange and mainframe servers have had to undergo in recent years in order to stay competitive, and it is also what application providers on other Unix platforms (Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX are the core Unixes in the enterprise) have had to do as well. Simply put, you can't sell turnkey OpenServer applications that use text screens. Customers expect graphical front ends that are not only pretty but also integrate with portals and other Web applications.

The initial projects that SCO has put up for bidding on the marketplace include creating device drivers for OpenServer and UnixWare, as well as porting various (and unspecified) open source applications to OpenServer and UnixWare. Developers are being asked to bid for the work; those who win will be hired by SCO's engineering team.

CEO Darl McBride says that he wants the SCO Marketplace to become an "online distribution engine" for business applications that run on OpenServer and UnixWare and are written by a large number of developers. It remains to be seen if developers will want to distribute their applications in this manner, but there are almost certainly coders who will want to contribute to the Unix cause--especially for cash.