From: davidsen@ariel.crd.GE.COM (william E Davidsen) Subject: Re: Linux vs. the world Date: 10 Aug 1992 18:07:15 GMT
In article <1992Aug08.001344.15942@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>, jliddle@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Jean Liddle) writes:
| In what way? When I was working at Bayer last summer one group was using
| SCO unix. The compiler couldn't even handle floating point numbers
| correctly, and unless you had purchased support, no free fixes were
| forthcomming. Furthermore, the system crashed more than once/day.
Obviously your system had been seriously trashed by someone at
install, because f.p. has worked on every version of SCO back to the 286
versions (xenix) through ODT, free fixes are available both by anon uucp
and ftp, to anyone, and most systems based on SCO not only don't have a
crash per day, they don't have crashes, period. Non hardware crashes are
pretty unusual unless you are breaking new ground with drivers. The
system I run for UNYUUG has been up for 358 days (oddly, I added the UPS
358 days ago).
| Linux, despite its few bugs, is much, much more stable (even with
| patches every week or so!). There is no question in my mind that linux
| is better than SCO unix - I can't comment on other unises, but I don't
| think the comments made before were someone's "enthusiasm" running away
| with them...
Based on over 100 machine-years experience with SCO I don't believe
there is a reliability problem in the product. Based on maintaining
almost 300k lines of production code on multiple machines, I don't
believe there's a problem with floating point. Based on having gotten
many fixes from sosco and uunet by uucp and ftp, without paying any
support cost, I don't believe there is any lack of support for all SCO
customers.
I do believe you have limited experience with a machine which might
well have a hardware problem or have been seriously misconfigured. That
doesn't make SCO bad.
--
bill davidsen, GE Corp. R&D Center; Box 8; Schenectady NY 12345
I admit that when I was in school I wrote COBOL. But I didn't compile.