moving from Sco to Linux

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>press any key to reboot  -oops- Jeremy Anderson said on Fri, Jul 23 08:41  
>
>> Greetings all!  
>
>> I'm quite new to the list, as well as filepro.
>> We currently have filepro 4.5, running on SCO.
>
>> The SCO box is getting long in the tooth, and we will soon
>> outgrow it. Has anyone migrated from 4.5/Sco to 5.0/Linux?
>> I'm looking at Mandrake 10.0 as the base OS, likely run on a
>> no-name server.
>
>Why Mandrake as opposed to some of the more popular Linux versions?
>SuSE seems to be highly regarded and is owned by Novell.
>
>Considering the way our international relations seem to be going
>personally I'd not care to use a French companies implementation.
>Just look at what they did to piss off all the other EU members
>last week in the visa/passport area.  If France denies you - you
>can't go to any other EU countries.    

When I was looking for a replacement for the Caldera Linux we had been
using since 1994 or so, I looked closely at Mandrake and liked a lot of
what I saw.  At the time Mandrake was in the French equivalent of
Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and there was talk that they would be rescued by the
French Government.  The last thing I want is a distribution run by a
company with that type of bureaucracy (after all the French invented
bureacracy :-).

I think that SuSE is far and away the best engineered of the Linux
distributions so would probably have chosen it in any case.

>Sorry to make this political but in business you need to make
>sure you can get support as time goes on and France seems quite
>anti-US - and American cyclists have been booed in the Tour de
>France.
>
>You didn't even mention the version of SCO you have - and depending
>on the version it might be cheaper and easier to move to new HW.
>It is important about the version - because of CPU support.

Furthermore, the future support of open source project such as Samba on SCO
products is doubtful.  That's not to say that it won't be possible to use
open source software on it, but it's very likely to be much more difficult
as the project's developers have been actively actively attacked by SCOG's
litigators.

I have a long history of support for open source projects on SCO's
operating systems going back to the late '80s on Xenix, but at this point
do very little with it beyond the programs which I consider essential for
my existing customers.  My OpenServer development box runs 5.0.6a, and I
have no plans to go beyond that to the newer OpenServer systems.

Bill
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