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It describes the product as the result of many years and millions of dollars worth of development and has certainly convinced the likes of HP, who will be selling a range of ProLiant servers running the Unix platform.

'As the worldwide market share leader of SCO Unix installations, HP is focused on delivering the latest technologies to HP ProLiant customers,' said Paul Miller, vice president of marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP. 'With the release of SCO OpenServer 6, HP continues to build on our leadership position of supporting SCO Unix operating systems on HP ProLiant servers.'

'Aligned with availability, HP will release a robust portfolio of SCO OpenServer 6 certifications on HP ProLiant platforms, storage, and networking options, offering customers the best managed infrastructure for SCO deployments,' he added

Sure, in this position HP has an existing customer base it still needs to support. SCO too has been careful to ensure customer upgrades are as painless as possible, with backwards-compatibility for systems and applications as far back as SCO Xenix, first built in 1983.

Yet HP remains a staunch supporter of Linux, even going so far as to offer customers of its hardware running Linux indemnification against potential litigation from SCO, with its campaign to extract what it considers royalty payments on its IP used in Linux.

HP's own HP-UX Unix system also has its detractors, with the likes of Sun's head honcho Jonathan Schwartz predicting an early grave last December.

Although this hasn't happened, the Unix market itself

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continues to be eaten away by Microsoft and Linux, and while HP is flag-waving for OpenServer 6, it would be forgiven if it preferred customers to buy its hardware with platforms enjoying rosier prospects.

That's not to detract from the quality of OpenServer 6. SCO's actions in the courtroom against the likes of IBM and Novell have positioned it as something of a pariah in the industry, yet it has found a good amount of support for this latest launch.

'As the flag bearer of the Unix on Intel environment, it's encouraging to see the SCO Group continuing their development of SCO OpenServer,' said Dan Kusnetzky, program vice president, System Software, Enterprise Computing Group, IDC. 'Based on the performance and security improvements, as well as integration with many popular Open Source technologies now found in SCO OpenServer 6, the SCO Group has given its customers quite a number of reasons to upgrade and continue investing in the SCO OpenServer platform. SCO's focus on research and development of SCO OpenServer will allow customers to continue realizing the benefits of the reliability and stability of Unix running on industry standard hardware.'

OpenServer 6 can handle files up to a terabyte in size, can run on hardware with up to 32 chips and allow applications to address up to 64GB of memory, with support for multi-threading.

On the security front it has added in SSH for remote encrypted log in, firewall IP filters and IPsec for enabling secure VPNs.

OpenServer 6 also includes a range of Open Source software, released under the GPL licence that SCO's CEO Darl McBride has publicly blasted in letters sent to members of Congress, which described the licence as a 'scheme' that 'seeks to commoditize software by reducing its monetary value to zero.' Yet clearly not so unpalatable that it couldn't stomach bundling GPL licensed Apache web server and Samba file and print services. There's a client version, too, which can run the GPL-ed KDE desktop.

OpenServer 6 is available now. The starter 2-user edition costs $599 and the Enterprise edition costs $1399 for a 10-user licence.

Visit www.sco.com for more information.