SCO is be­com­ing In­ter­graph.

For those who don't know it, In­ter­graph was once a work­sta­tion mak­er.Last year they had 10M in busi­ness in­come. And 385M in law­suit in­come.

Ba­si­cal­ly the com­pa­ny sits in a few patents, does noth­ing, and milks ev­ery­one else (not that it's il­le­gal to do so).

And why I say SCO is be­com­ing in­ter­graph?

Let's look at the pos­si­ble in­come sources for SCO, shall we?

1. SCO OpenServ­er and UnixWARE: pret­­ty much just up­­­grad­ing old server­s. That is not go­ing to pay for R&D for new ver­­sion­s, and then this dries up, be­­cause no new ver­­sion == no up­­­grades == no in­­­come. Un­­less of course, this gets sub­­si­dies from some­where else.

2. Caldera Lin­ux == If this suit killed some­thing, this is what got whacked

3. Li­­cen­s­ing of IP, ei­ther friend­­ly or force­­ful a.k.a the In­­ter­­graph path

4. There is no d!

And about c)... who is go­ing to li­cense the UNIX stuff from SCO any­more? This suit means if you do it, you can NEV­ER AGAIN de­vel­op a unix sys­tem or a lin­ux sys­tem, or SCO will sue your as­s. To do that to get a tech­nol­o­gy that is not too much bet­ter than Free­BSD... it makes no sense. Spe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing there will be no R&D on it any­more (see a).

The on­ly ones with UNIX li­cens­es wil be those who got them from AT&T, and they don't pay a dime to SCO. BTW: this ba­si­cal­ly means Sun, since HP-UX and IR­IX and the rest is on their death bed any­way (and AIX... well, just think about it ;-).

So c), the on­ly vis­i­ble in­come source for SCO be­comes "We will sue peo­ple, and live on what we get out of set­tle­ments".

Be­cause SCO can't even do a GOOD In­ter­graph and ac­tu­al­ly win the law­suit­s. Not this one, and not against IB­M, at least, and they don't have a good patent port­fo­lio!

Tu put it an­oth­er way, SCO will be­come a bul­ly that will try to look im­pres­sive and steal milk mon­ey from small­er com­pa­nies. That is, they will, if IBM lets them.

If IBM caves in and set­tles, SCO will look im­pres­sive enough for this to work. Which is why I hope IBM beats the crap out of them, just to make SCO have to work to earn an hon­est buck.