SCO begins shipping OpenServer 6

The SCO Group  is in the headlines more often for its legal battles than its products these days, but on Wednesday the software maker wrapped up three years of development work and began shipping a major update of its Unix operating system, SCO OpenServer 6.

The software, codenamed Legend, has been in beta testing since last year and was originally scheduled to ship in the first quarter, but its completion date slid a bit, a SCO spokesman acknowledged.

The update is intended to modernize OpenServer, which SCO targets at small and midsize businesses. It supports file sizes up to 1T byte, increases memory support from 4G bytes to 64G bytes, and adds new security features. Performance enhancements were a major focus: At a launch event in New York, SCO executives said their benchmark tests showed OpenServer 6 running two and three times faster than SCO's last OpenServer update, version 5.0.7.

Lindon, Utah-based SCO is fighting to stay relevant in a competitive server operating system market that includes Linux, Windows, and Unix vendors like IBM,  HP and Sun that do significantly more business than SCO, which saw its revenue sink to $43 million last year -- down 46% from 2003. Its highly publicized lawsuit against IBM for allegedly violating SCO's Unix copyrights in IBM's Linux work costs SCO millions each quarter. As of April 30, SCO was down to $14.2 million in cash and liquid assets, having used $17.7 million in cash over the prior six months.

One customer at SCO's OpenServer 6 launch event, Home Hardware Stores technical specialist Stan Hubble, said he's unfazed by SCO's financial and legal issues. Hubble works on development of a custom inventory management application that is used by around 350 of St. Jacobs, Ontario-based Home Hardware Stores' 1,100 independently operated stores throughout Canada. The 15-year-old application runs on OpenServer. "They were the most stable game in town at the time," Hubble said of the decision in 1990 to choose the operating system. "There weren't really other choices."

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.