Xinuous (the company birthed from SCO's ashes) has announced its new OpenServer X operating system. It is described as a "mature and proven 64-bit operating system to support your most critical line of business applications, yet is affordably priced to host all computing needs", and it is "the continuation and consolidation of all previous Xinuos product families, SCO OpenServer® 5 & 6 and SCO UnixWare® 7".
According to the announcement,
Beginning with OpenServer X, the download and installation of the operating system is offered free of charge by Xinuos and includes the source code. A support bundle is available for customers who need affordable support, maintenance, upgrades and access to the tested Xinuos Application Collection. The support is available 24/7 by default at a highly competitive price.
Also announced is the Xinuos Business One Developer Program,
The new program is designed to assist developers who wish to port existing applications or build new applications to run on OpenServer X™, their recently announced secure, BSD-based open source operating system. Application developers and other partners who need applications that run on the OpenServer X operating system can join the Xinuos Business One Developer Program and benefit from a growing number of resources to assist them at every stage of their business.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @07:52PM
But I doubt if they'll get any new ones... the SCO brand name was shot to hell by the previous regime.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:33AM
The SCO ashes should have been re-cremated seven times, half buried in the Mariana Trench and the other half shot off into space.
I used to work a lot on SCO in the mid 90's .. learned a lot of UNIX then that helps me even today with Linux. But the whole legal drama that dragged on - never want to hear of them again in any form, however re-constituted, cleansed, repented or repainted.
(Score: 1, Informative) by BsAtHome on Monday July 27 2015, @07:53PM
Didn't everybody already upgrade to a BSD or Linux distro long long ago
Whoever needs SCO legacy anymore? The SCO saga has accelerated most porting efforts afaik. Dead company walking^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcrawling. For those not yet ported their software should do so asap and be off a lot cheaper.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khedoros on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:40AM
(Score: 3, Funny) by FrogBlast on Monday July 27 2015, @08:02PM
OpenServer X... let's just abbreviate that to OS X. Finally, a professional Unix-based operating system that's affordable enough for anyone to use: OS X.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:30AM
There's also no way that Open Server X would be confused with an X Server or X/Open. But yeah, I can't imagine anything that it does appreciably better than Linux at this point. 20 years ago, it may have had a reputation for being "rock solid" but today it's something most industry professionals have never worked with and would be highly dubious of using without a really compelling reason. I can't imagine why anybody would thing there's a market beyond a few legacy customers who aren't doing significant new deployments and just want to re-up an existing service contract to avoid migrating some old code to a newer and more common platform.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:07AM
I though the name smacks of typical M$ fudding tactics to choose names to muddle the waters around famous existing products, like "office open xml" etc.
Disgusting.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by mr_mischief on Monday July 27 2015, @08:15PM
Xinuos wanted me to register as a developer (no doubt to pad their stats of people sworn to provide third-party software) just to download the documentation, including the license. So is it BSD? GPL? LGPL? MIT? Apache? Or is it "Open Source" just because they call it OpenServer X. OpenServer's never been open source before. Getting the source with the binaries and being unable to redistribute that source and changes to it is not "open source", and all I read about source code from that announcement is that it's available to the customer.
Also, this says it's BSD-based, but OpenServer was mostly System V based previously. Is this a hybrid of BSD and the old SCO OpenServer code? Is it an open-sourcing of OpenServer? Is it a FreeBSD spinoff or something combined with branding and a support contract?
For being such a wordy announcement, it actually says very little about the core attributes of what's being announced.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @08:24PM
It's Open as in "Can of Worms".
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @08:33PM
From their announcement they list a lot of features of FreeBSD. So take that as you will.
(Score: 1) by tekk on Monday July 27 2015, @08:34PM
Did anyone else get that out of their "Key Features" list? I'm more of an OpenBSD guy but is there anything at all in their article that doesn't already exist in FreeBSD? Aside from that web admin system they apparently threw in, which is surely a fantastic idea that can never go wrong.
(Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Monday July 27 2015, @08:37PM
Yep, pretty much.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @08:38PM
So how long until they start suing the FreeBSD people for stealing their code?
(Score: 2, Informative) by mr_mischief on Monday July 27 2015, @09:57PM
The web admin system sounds a lot like Webmin. I did some searching and within tens of seconds found other web-based system software named very similarly.: X-Admin [webdevelopment.iws.ro]
This is not too surprising, though. They seem to be rebranding FreeBSD as the OS, and Xinu is already an OS (one used for a series of books/courses on OS design and implementation similarly to Minix).: Xinu [purdue.edu]
Also, the announcement states it's the first open source OS they've offered. That's simply a lie. Caldera bought SCO (symbol: SCO) and renamed the whole merged company The SCO Group (symbol: SCOX). Then they started suing people over Linux. The truth was, though, that before and for a while after the merger they sold Caldera OpenLinux. I even own a boxed copy of Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 as a matter of fact. Yes, Xinuos is UnXis, and yes technically UnXis was a "new company [zdnet.com]" that was founded and immediately bought the OS assets of The SCO Group. Basically, though, Attachmate owns the Unix code. The Open Group owns the "Unix" trademark. Caldera/TSG sold off some trademarks and some custom code along with code licensed from Novell/Attachmate so that people could still make money on those assets once TSG went belly-up from pursuing its idiotic lawsuits. I'm not convinced the sale was to independent parties, and was probably just a formal shelter for the parasites to create their own new host. This company is in the lineage of Caldera, so saying this is the first open-source OS they've sold is at most half true.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday July 27 2015, @10:12PM
I don't know nearly enough here to make a truly informed decision, but it doesn't help keeping the name.
In a way, it sounds like Hitler(tm) branded breakfast sausage that's now Kosher. As long as the lineage of that company is the same (read: same assholes in monkey suits), I think I will steer clear of it. The bonus is that it sounds like most of it are features found in the BSD ecosystem *anyways*, and I've been moving over to OpenBSD for around 6 months now.
Just hearing the name SCO group makes me think there aren't enough legal protections invented to work with them.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @08:40PM
Wonder if their trademark people checked in with Douglas Comer, of XINU fame.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @08:43PM
Cool story, brah.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:30AM
Xinuos Is Not Unix, Or SCO
(Score: 4, Funny) by deimios on Monday July 27 2015, @08:42PM
"the company birthed from SCO's ashes"- how poetic. More like the company that crawled out of the fetid pool that formed under the undead corpse of SCO that was struck down time after time until it was too broken to stand up. Well going with this analogy the new company is more like the detached torso that still tries to hunt for victims while hoping it's small enough to not be noticed.
(Score: 2, Funny) by mechanicjay on Monday July 27 2015, @08:48PM
"Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to ya! I'll bite your legs off!"
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @11:55PM
"fetid pool"
Still too poetic for the likes of SCO. More along the lines of the juice that comes out of a meat market trash truck mixed with raw sewage from a 3rd world country and topped off with a spritz of the wrung out, unwashed panties off a crack whore on her period after a marathon fuck fest and crack induced diarrhea. Damn ... still too nice.
(Score: 1) by barrahome on Monday July 27 2015, @08:43PM
I will give a try, never say never maybe there is someting good there.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @08:45PM
Just use FreeBSD. It's what this thing is built on anyway.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by barrahome on Monday July 27 2015, @09:02PM
You have to try everything, then decide what's best for you. I don't care if its FreeBSD. Look at Ubuntu for example, you can tell before it was this big "use Debian". And here we are, must of people use Ubuntu now! ;)
(Score: 1, Troll) by zeigerpuppy on Monday July 27 2015, @09:45PM
Would have been nice if the summary provided some context or discussion of features/why we should care. I think its a bit useless to just post a marketing press release.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday July 28 2015, @09:19PM
I, for one, care.
If I did not read the summary I wouldn't know SCO is still around with another name. My list of "Things I won't touch with a ten foot pole" gets another entry.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday July 27 2015, @11:47PM
nVidia offers native drivers for their high-performance graphics hardware, and the industry standard Motif® and OpenGL® libraries are supported.
Holy shit! I'll finally be able to use CDE in style! Party like it's 1985!
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
After many years as proprietary software, Motif was released in 2012 as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Oh… and there it is in my repo…
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @01:40PM
The other benefit of CDE is to piss off the UX-tards of the world.