In-Depth

Briefs: IBM calls SCO's bluff; Axios updates job monitoring tool

SCO revokes IBM's Unix license; Axios announces new version of SmartProduction

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 07/01/2003

What if The SCO Group revoked a Unix license and nobody cared? That’s the situation in which the embattled vendor found itself last week when it formally rescinded IBM’s license to sell Unix, with nary a peep from IBM.

To recap, SCO in early March charged IBM with breaching the terms of its Unix license by deliberately misappropriating its proprietary Unix source code to help accelerate the development of Linux.

At the time, SCO gave IBM 100 days to comply with the terms of its license to sell Unix. That deadline lapsed (http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=1803) two weeks ago.

Sure enough, a SCO spokesperson confirms that her company has “terminated IBM's right to use or distribute any software product that is a modification of or based on UNIX System V source code.”

IBM’s AIX Unix operating environment is said to contain some Unix System V source code and associated libraries.

Big Blue is apparently unfazed by SCO’s move, however: It’s still selling AIX on its pSeries servers, for example, and appears unwilling to cease doing so—short of a court order.

And that, says Gordon Haff, a senior analyst with consultancy Illuminata, is precisely where the next rounds of the SCO-IBM fracas will unfold. “[The revocation of IBM’s Unix license is] sort of a required legal step that SCO needed to take as part of pressing their claim against IBM. By itself, it doesn’t mean anything. SCO had to do it, otherwise, essentially, their bluff would have been called. It looks like things are going to be moving on into the court.”

Some analysts have speculated that SCO has little chance of obtaining an injunction to prevent IBM from shipping AIX.

“[SCO would] have to be able to show two things: That the shipment of AIX is going to do them irreparable damage, and that they actually have a chance of winning the case,” comments Rob Enderle, a senior fellow with Forrester Research subsidiary Giga Information Group. “The clear and present damage part is a tough threshold to cross, and I’m having a hard time picturing a judge granting them the injunction that they want.”

Axios Updates Mainframe Job Monitoring Tool

Axios Products Inc. announced version 3.6.0 of SmartProduction, a batch analysis and tuning tool that helps users reduce the frequency and cost of system failures.

SmartProduction v3.6.0 provides statistics and details on the frequency and impact of different types of failures, and reports on jobs with poor availability. Axios says that this allows operators to more easily identify jobs that have failed.

Operators can use SmartProduction to monitor job failures such as system abends or user abends, along with jobs that have completion codes greater than user selected values.

SmartProduction features a new entry panel that displays all JOBHIST databases at a particular site. The new entry panel is also used to select the appropriate database to be utilized in a given online session.

The new version boasts enhanced application support in the form of new panels that facilitate selection by job name or job mask, letting users select jobs by application name. It also features an enhanced Data Set Analysis Selection Panel that allows data set name masks to be specified so users can receive a list of all matching data sets that can be analyzed one at a time.

SmartProduction runs under all supported versions of MVS/ESA, OS/390 and z/OS.

See http://www.axios.com for more details.