UnitedLinux

Today, June 5, 2002,
Red Hat,
Oracle
and
Dell
are
announcing
"their collective commitments to Linux for the enterprise" (sounds
almost Communist, doesn't it?) in a big launch event at Oracle's
place in Silicon Valley. Invitations sent to the press said new
products from all three companies would feature "Unbreakable
Linux."Perhaps not coincidentally, four Linux distributors--Caldera,
Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux--got a bit of a jump on those
festivities by announcing
UnitedLinux
on May 30th. Whether or not the two announcements were
coincidental, it's hard not to presume Newtonian market mechanics:
for every competitive action by a dominant company, there is an
equal and opposite reaction by its remaining competitors.UnitedLinux calls itself "a standards-based Linux operating
system targeted at the business user" that is "developed, marketed
and sold by an experienced partnership of Linux companies." It will
be based on the Linux Standard Base (LSB), LiN18ux and the "best
practices" of the four partners. UnitedLinux will own the brand and
the intellectual property of the partnership, employ its own staff
and have its own board of directors. It will feature extensive
localization in multiple languages and offer services for
education, customer support, training, certification and
consulting. The four partners are looking to save development and
certification costs, and each offers faster times to their various
markets.Right now they are testing an alpha version and plan to have
the first finished versions ready in Q4 of this year. They also
expect UnitedLinux 2.0 to be ready in Q3-Q4 2003. It will run on
Intel's 32- and 64-bit architectures, plus IBM's zSeries, iSeries
and pSeries of midrange and mainframe computers.Each partner will continue to sell its own brands of Linux,
"powered by UnitedLinux". The foursome isn't exclusive about
membership; other partner candidates are invited to
participate.The four expect to compete through their own custom
implementations, bundled applications, OEM deals, support systems,
pricing and channel relationships. In other words, each distributor
turns into a sales and marketing organization. The
UnitedLinux web
site carries supportive remarks by AMD, Borland, Computer
Associates , Hewlett-Packard, SAP, the Free Standards Group and
others.The source code will be made freely available under the GPL.
UnitedLinux will not be distributing binaries, however, and this
doesn't sit well with some people. Last night on
The Linux Show,
Russell
Pavlicek, Open Source Columnist for
Infoworld and author of Embracing
Insanity : Open Source Software Development, says the
withholding of binaries "seems to carry the assumption that the
community leeches off their development". He fears that, "if
(UnitedLinux) were to become the dominant force, they would take on
themselves the mantle that the community is a necessary evil",
because so far, "there is nothing that indicates any sense at all
that the community is in any way involved." (He elaborates in
Where
UnitedLinux got it Wrong at NewsForge.)Criticism has risen over statements by Caldera that it may
offer "per-seat" licensing of its own UnitedLinux distribution to
customers, which would be a novel move for a Linux vendor. In
Caldera's case it may also speak to demand, since many customers
Caldera inherited from SCO are accustomed to licensing on a
per-seat basis. Regardless of the reasons, Richard Stallman still
believes per-seat licensing is at variance with the GPL. He
wrote
this to Linux and Main:"'Licensing per seat' perverts the GNU+Linux
system into something that respects your freedom as much as
Windows.... They cannot restrict the GPL-covered programs in the
system that way because that would violate the GNU GPL, but the
system also contains non-copylefted programs which are points of
vulnerability. Free software developers, please don't let them
license YOUR program per seat. Use the GNU GPL!"Red Hat's muted response came in the form of a written
statement that says, "Too many distributions hamper the migration
of applications to Linux, so if this effort by Caldera and others
consolidates distributions, it is a good development." The
statement adds, "Time will tell if the [UnitedLinux] group's
distribution will achieve the same level of support" (offered by
Red Hat ).We'll give the last word to Jon "maddog" Hall, President and
Executive Director of Linux
International:As one of the instigators of the Linux Standard
Base, I would like to see one version of Linux that the ISVs and
hardware vendors can test against. Yet I also believe that
competition is what makes products strong and having only one
version of the base system means that competition is stifled.
There was going to be a reduction in the number of Linux
distributions, and the way that it occurred could either be
disastrous for the Linux community or have it managed....As I have understood UnitedLinux, it will create a binary
standard distribution and boot path. All of the distributions will
share in this, with each distribution adding its layered
functionality on top of that to create its specific distro. This
will not only make for a strong "second" distribution, but will
allow the Linux industry to cut costs in distribution
development.Doc Searls is senior editor
of Linux Journal.

email: doc@ssc.com