SCO Offers Up The 'SCAMP' Stack

Robert wrote to mention a Computer Business Review Online article about SCO's newest marketing tactic. They're offering their OS as part of a 'SCAMP' stack, ala the more familiar LAMP setup. From the article: "The Lindon, Utah-based Unix vendor has included the open source Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP and Perl programming languages with its SCO OpenServer operating system since the launch of OpenServer 6 in June 2005. It is now pitching the technologies as a SCAMP stack, placing it squarely up against the Linux-based LAMP stack. SCO claims that Linux contains Unix code donated to the open source operating system in violation of agreements between it and IBM Corp."

Great name choice!

scamp (skmp)

n.

1. A rogue; a rascal.
2. A mischievous youngster.

tr.v

• To perform in a careless superficial way.

Re:Great name choice!

I just prefer the first "SCAM" [google.com] definition name for short.

rascal?

In Ireland, a "scamp" is like a rascal. Like when a child does something and almost gets away with it, and no one's made, they'd be called a little scamp.

Is it not so in other countries or are SCO just the stupidest company ever to last this long?

Re:rascal?

Presumably due to heavy Irish immigration during the Potato famine, that word is definitely in the US vocabulary, too. I have no idea what crack they were smoking for that name, because there's just no way nobody involved knew what it meant.

I honestly said out loud when I saw this story on the frontpage, "Is this a joke?"

Incidentally, a lot of words survive in English primarily as part of a phrase, with their older, original meanings lost. In a way, the phrase is the word. For example, "hither and yon"; neither word is in common or even uncommon use anymore on its own, but the phrase is still used uncommonly. While "scamp" has not descended to this level, there is a phrase associated with it in my mind that may outlast the word itself: 'a scamp and a scoundrel [google.com]' (and note we don't much use "scoundrel" anymore either), as in "he's a scamp and a scoundrel".

So again, what crack were these people smoking? I mean, I know we like to bag on marketters around here, but there is a certain level of skill involved...

Scamp: From Dictionary.com

scamp1 Audio pronunciation of "scamp" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (skmp)
n.

      1. A rogue; a rascal.
      2. A mischievous youngster.

How appropriate. . .

Blah, blah, blah

It is now pitching the technologies as a SCAMP stack, placing it squarely up against the Linux-based LAMP stack. SCO claims that Linux contains Unix code donated to the open source operating system in violation of agreements between it and IBM Corp.

Big whoop. SCAMP, LAMP... so SCO is trying to compete with Linux. This is hardly news. As a matter of fact, you have to wonder what took them so long. Have they become so lawsuit happy that they've forgotten how to compete?

Re:Blah, blah, blah

Have they become so lawsuit happy that they've forgotten how to compete?

Yes, actually. As soon as Caldera took over the SCO Unix business, they pretty much dropped any real support for the platform and focused their efforts on sueing Linux. If the reports are to be believed, their distributors were about ready to hang them during the various regional meetings. The SCO corporate reps came across as somewhat anxious about all the bad will towards them, but definitely not apologetic.

The fallout of these meetings was expected to be that SCO would lose a lot of their local distributors. The results of which would be catastrophic if SCO were actually trying to do business. Now that they realize that their lawsuit has failed, they've found that they've screwed themselves on being able to do business. In addition, they've burned their OSS bridge (guess we won't be seeing an opensco.org, eh?), leaving them with no real edge in the market. So now they're trying to convince businesses that they can provide OSS support without being an OSS supporter.

My prediction? You're going to be seeing quite a few new Solaris 10/OpenSolaris installations very soon now.

Caldera

I even remember back when they were Caldera. We'd see them at tradeshows all the time and wonder how on earth they planned to make it as a RedHat clone. I never thought they'd go this route. It's pretty sad really.

This is all pretty indicative of the times. A company need not actually make a product people need to use. They just have to either scare people away from competitors, or convince them that a bigger name is actually more important. Of course, bigger name for SCO just means that more people have heard of them due to unfounded lawsuits. Free publicity is good publicity I suppose.

Re:Tetris Installer!

I heard that the reason nobody does this is that some evil corp has a patent on mini-games during installers.

I'm not really sure how, I remember playing pac man on my sinclair once while a game was loading from tape, which would surely be prior art.

Not safe to use

It isn't safe to use SCAMP. SCO's corporate future is uncertain. They've based their entire company around a lawsuit that it looks like they will probably lose. It would be a bad idea to use SCAMP for a production system only to have SCO go bankrupt a year or two later.

Sure, you could convert your SCAMP-based application to LAMP if that happens, but doing that on a production system is very costly due to all the manpower to switch platforms and all the testing to make sure everything works.

You should ask yourself, what advantages does SCAMP offer over LAMP that warrants the risk of using a platform from a dying company? Are there even any such advantages at all?

Re:Not safe to use

It would be a bad idea to use SCAMP for a production system only to have SCO go bankrupt a year or two later.

I wouldn't say that.

SCAMP is short on details, but it sounds like it's exactly the same tools as in LAMP ... but in SCO. Except that you could just drop your application back into Linux, and it would just work there too. You could also move it to FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenBSD ... probably even Windows (most of the LAMP stuff runs under cygwin at least, and there's probably native Windows versions of most of it) and it would even work there with minimal work.

I don't see much danger here. (Of course, I don't see much benefit in going with SCO in the first place, and so I certainly wouldn't do so.)

As far as I can tell, it's just a marketing ploy. `Look! We can do the same thing as Linux, but we have a cuter name for it! So use us!'. There's little danger, as your application would probably port right back to a LAMP system with little effort, but there's no benefit either, because a LAMP system would work just as well from the beginning.

Re:Not safe to use

XAMPP and other similar projects make it really easy to install all that stuff under windows. It's easier in some respects to install XAMPP under windows than it is for Linux, particulary for someone with out any Linux experience.

"The distribution for Windows 98, NT, 2000 and XP. This version contains: Apache, MySQL, PHP + PEAR, Perl, mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ssl, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, Webalizer, Mercury Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare Systems v3.32, JpGraph, FileZilla FTP Server, mcrypt, eAccelerator, SQLite, and WEB-DAV + mod_auth_mysql. "

Jason

Re:Not safe to use

It isn't safe to use LAMP. GNU's fiscal future is certain. They've based their entire organization around giving software away for free. It would be a bad idea to use LAMP for a production system only to have the developers get 'real jobs'.

Sure, you could convert your LAMP-based application to SCAMP if that happens, but doing that on a production system is very costly due to all the manpower to document the old system and all the conversions from unsupported formats.

You should ask yourself, what advantages does LAMP offer over SCAMP that warrants the risk of using a platform from a bunch of communist hippies? Are there even any such advantages at all?

SCAMP?

All right, lets get the jokes about SCO, SCAMP, scams and irony out here right now.

It will save a lot of viewing time for those readers who actually want to find out about how SCAMP measures up to LAMP, LAPP, WAMP etc.

Am I the only one?

Am I the only one who read that first as "...SCAMP Attack"?

wink-and-nod

Somewhere in the dank basement levels far below Darl McBride's office, SCO's only remaining systems engineer is laughing wildly. They actually went with "SCAMP"! The fools!

Pay more for less!

LAMP isn't so much a literal acronym as much as is stands for the concept of all the components being open source. I doubt many people would stop calling it LAMP if it included FreeBSD instead of Linux, nor would replacing MySQL with ProgreSQL suddenly turn it into something completely different. Hell, the P can mean PHP, Perl or Python, and I think even Ruby would count as a LAMP language.

So how this SCAMP thing is supposed to be anything special, is completely beyond my comprehention.

However, I for one would be VERY curious as to how SCO is treating all the different FOSS licenses which apply. As far as I know, Apache's license has a mutual patent annihilation clause, and I'm pretty sure the other licenses have their own set of rules too. It would be all too funny if one of them found a reason to sue SCO over their prepackaged SCAMP solution.

Re:Pay more for less!

I doubt many people would stop calling it LAMP if it included FreeBSD instead of Linux

I've seen "FLPR" (FreeBSD / LigHTTPd / Postgres / Ruby (on Rails)) gaining popularity...

SCAMP : Dogfood or Dogshit?

Darl can't even eat his own dogfood ...
http://www.sco.com [sco.com] was running Apache on Linux [netcraft.com] when last queried at 9-Mar-2006 20:57:45 GMT
Worse still ...
http://www.edgeclickpark.com [edgeclickpark.com] was running Apache on Windows 2000 [netcraft.com] when last queried at 14-Mar-2006 14:43:14 GMT

Microsoft Windows 2000 Server with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by 21 Secunia advisories [secunia.com] some of which are rated Highly critical.

What?

Who is running this stupid company?

Daimler-Chrysler should sue SCO

Trademark violation. Plymouth owns the "intellectual property rights".

http://www.turbinecar.com/scamp.htm [turbinecar.com]

Tcl

And if they replace the PHP package with Tcl, they can call it SCAT.

Re:Tcl

And if SCO moves to Houston and they replace Apache with IIS, it would then be called SHIT. Oh wait, all SCO products (and SCO, too) already are.

claim?

SCO claims that Linux contains Unix code donated to the open source operating system in violation of agreements between it and IBM Corp."

Wow! That's big news if it's true. Why haven't we heard more about this?

SCAMP disease

Am I the only one who thinks the word SCAMP sounds like a disease? It's like: "I got the SCAMP from a burrito at Taco Bell last night".

1 2 1 2 The Naken Crew

From the Article

'"We decided on SCAMP because it was easier to pronounce than 699LCSTB," McBride was later quoted as saying.'

What really caught my eye here:

While OpenServer 6 was launched in two versions, with the Starter Edition for two users costing $599, and the Enterprise Edition for 10 users costing $1,399, the SCAMP stack is licensed for five users and is available for $999 until July 31.

Now wait, I'd be curious about this. It sounds to me like "SCAMP" is basically four free programs packaged together. Every single one of those four programs is under a different open source license, and the strictest of those licenses-- the GPL [theregister.co.uk]-- SCO is probably not bound by becuase they bought a commercial MySQL license from MySQL AB. But I have to wonder, exactly how are they enforcing this "licensed for five users" bit and are the licenses of all the included softwares okay with this? Perl at least allows closed-source redistribution I think, what about the others?

Re:What really caught my eye here:

SCO only allows a specific number of login shells to be active at once... it's really obnoxious.

I worked at a place that used SCO OpenServer about 5 years ago... the costs were outrageous. At that time you had to buy additional users in multiples of 25, which cost about $5000 + 20% annual maintenance.

SCAMP in 1999

I can't comment on what the point is in 2006. Back around 1996-9 when Caldera was doing this the idea was that there were commercial applications which hasn't been ported to Linux. Thus there was a chicken and egg problem for OEMs with LAMP; they depended on other apps or libraries and the libraries needed apps to make it worth the trouble to port.... The Linux abi project pretty much solved this problem. Further the commercial apps on SCO don't really exist anymore.

Anyway, a little irony. Caldera invented the term LAMP as part of their VAR marketing. its ironic that the SCO Group (which is the child of Caldera international) has to mimic a term they in some sense created.

Lets see

Does the lawsuit come for free, or is it extra? SCO sues their customers, so why again would I touch them, 10 foot pole or not?

Then again, lets see about the technical merits. Other than the underlying OS, it is the same as the LAMP package. That means the choice is Linux vs SCO. From what I gather, SCO is:
1) Less secure
2) More expensive
3) Prone to legal attacks toward users
4) Far less supported
5) Far less available software/plugins
6) Has serious questions about the company being there in a year
7) Laughably scalable
8) Drivers?

I could go on, but you get the point. The vultures are circling, and no amount of hand-waving is going to fix things.

              -Charlie

SCAMP

At least they got the 'SCAM' part right!

oh, the irony

didn't sco executives claim that linux was being used by terrorists? i seem to recall they claimed this in testimony in washington or in a letter to lawmakers.

the claim was too obvious... i'm certain that linux, windows, macs, and all other kinds of OSes and computers are being used by terrorists. (except for Windows Millenium Edition, which Al Qaida's IT department would not support because it sucked so bad).

but sco's suggestion was not the fact that terrorists use all kinds of tools, but rather they slyly implied that linux is a danger to national security.

so... linux is beneficial to terrorists, but open source databases aren't? couldn't be because sco decided they wanted to ship a open source db also, would it?

of all the falsehoods coming out of that company, this one is almost funny.

AMP noises

I wonder if "WAMP" is the noise made when someone knocks over the LAMP on top of the SCAMP?

Scamp?

Schnorrer sounds better.

Re:SCAMP - P = SCAM

Well, I was going to put that as, "Remember, boys and girls, you can't say SCAMP without SCAM," but your way works too.