i noticed an interesting email to the gcc mailing list today while reading through the thread about their stance on further support for SCO unix given SCO's rather antisocial behavior of late:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-07/msg01696.html
it's kind of interesting. the guy posting it is actually someone i sort of know, as he sometimes posts to the subversion mailing lists. he works for SCO and does a lot of work making sure that various bits and pieces of open source software work on the platform. i get the impression that a lot of it is the semi-approved sort of thing that often gets done by engineers who use these packages in their job and submit patches so that others won't have to deal with the same issues they did.
in general, he's always been quite reasonable in all interactions i've had with him, helpfully sending in patches to fix build issues on his platform and pointing out ways we could make the software work better for use cases that most of us don't deal with on a regular basis, and it really hit me how despite the way the management of SCO has been acting lately, there are still a lot of your average (or above average in his case) everyday geeks working for them, just trying to get their jobs done who are probably quite annoyed that their superiors have managed to get the rest of the geek world really really pissed at them.
the presense of such people at SCO doesn't change my opinion of the company all that much, and i still hope IBM will wipe the floor with them, but just as in any war, it's really too bad about all the collateral damage, and people like kean are just that in this case.
