SCO has joined Linux International as a corporate member, evidently reasoning that the enemy of its real enemy – in this case, Microsoft Corp and its Windows NT operating system – is its friend. The sponsorship means money and support for the improvement and expansion of the use of Linux. Tion Johnson, the engagingly titled czar of free stuff at SCO, says the sponsorship is in recognition of the groundswell of popular support for Linux, once marginalized as a hobbyist platform but now steadily infiltrating corporate America. Johnson points out that SCO was a pioneering member of the 86open group, which tried to get a common programming and binary interface together for various flavors of Unix. That turned out to be hard. Emulating Linux applications on SCO is likely to be a lot easier, and since most Linux distributions can already emulate SCO binaries, it effectively doubles the potential market for applications, making it a lot more attractive to develop for both platforms. Is this is a tacit acknowledgement of UnixWare’s defeat? Since Linux showed up in surveys as the only non-NT operating system to be increasing its market share, everyone from Computer Associates to Informix has jumped on the open source bandwagon.
