[Smaug] A quick scripting puzzle

[cerise@armory.com]

On Sat, Nov 19, 2005 at 06:55:40PM -0800, Meg McRoberts wrote:
> This is very interesting...  How many ex-SCO-ites are
> on this list?  This isn't exactly how it looked from
> the inside...

   I wasn't a SCO-ite.  I just lived with a few.  Michael Thornburgh,
John DuBois, Irene Lubkin, and Tony Morel.  I lived at the Armory for
around 5 years.
   I very nearly worked there, but it was right before the first round
of big layoffs.  Afterwards, I wasn't interested in working there.  Not
because of the lawsuit, but because they'd sold off the bits that were
Intergalactic Digital Research by that time.  8)
   At least I have a ton of things they threw out.  They contributed
quite a bit to my collection, including boogeyman.  I briefly considered
putting UnixWare on it, actually.
 
> We did invest a lot in providing backward compatibility
> for Xenix drivers and applications and almost everything
> did run on OpenServer.

   Between merge and the compatibility layers for solaris, they
still do a pretty decent job.
 
> SCO had a phenomenal licensing agreement for the SVR3
> kernel so it was never feasible to port to an SVR4 base
> although we incorporated many SVR4 features into the
> OpenServer kernel.
>
> UnixWare as well as ownership of all the SVR kernels came
> with the 1995 acquisition.  The original plan was to do
> a system that incorporated the elegant kernel technology
> of UnixWare with the OpenServer user interface, which was
> very popular with the customers.  Alas, political skirmishes
> prevented that from happening at the time although I hear
> that the new release does exactly that.

   My understanding was that a project called Gemini had planned
on porting the userspace for OpenServer onto UnixWare.  Further,
they succeeded in porting the one thing that everyone reviled --
Custom!  
   I oughtn't say much about the current efforts, but it seems
funny that the one project which SCO was really in a position to
do is being accomplished now that the company has been pared down
to a pale reminder of the good ol' days.

-Phil/CERisE