SCO's Michels Blasts 'Punk Kids' Linux'

Joseph E. Maglitta
Computerworld

April 26, 1999

"It's weird," said Doug Michels, president and CEO of The Santa Cruz Operation Inc. (SCO) in Santa Cruz, Calif., which owns the rights to Unix. "We won the war. We beat the minicomputers ... We still think of ourselves as rebels, but we're boring establishment now."

The rebel these days is the open-source operating system called Linux, which Michels blasted in a recent talk with Computerworld industry editor Joseph E. Maglitta.

Q: Do you consider Linux friend or foe?
A: Linux is a religion. It's like considering the Catholic Church a competitor. I'm not a religion; I'm a commercial operating system.
Companies like Red Hat ... take Linux technology with a lot less value added, and they pachage it up and say, "Hey, this is better than SCO." Well, it isn't. And very few customers are buying that story.

Q: Do you see Linux as Unix Jr.?
A: Linux didn't break any ground. They took the [application programming interfaces] of Unix and re-engineered that lightweight kernel that implemented those APIs. Linux is just a kernel ... but it's nice, elegant and small, easy to understand. So now we've got some punk young kids who've taken and engineered pieces around the Unix [kernel].

Q: What are Linux's weaknesses?
A. They're not in control of their roadmap. They ship whatever happens to be current in the Linux community. When you're selling to [major corporations], they want to know who you are, where you're going, where you've been, how you treat customers. Second, Linux products are not particularly scalable and don't handle multiprocessors well.
Another thing is reliability. It takes millions of dollars to run [reliability] tests. It takes expensive people, expensive labs, expensive [electric] bills, racks and racks of hardware, and really boring, hard, grubby work. It isn't stuff that people do for fun at home with volunteers.
[Then there's] the whole intellectual property issue. The last thing they want is some kid from Norway to sue for $100 million for misappropriation of intellectual property.

Q. But you see Linux providing modules for SCO?
A: As far as I'm concerned, it's free R&D. A lot of developers who have always preferred Unix are developing on Linux. The last thing in the world I want is some cool app and have my customer go, "Oh, God, if I only had Linux, I could get that app."