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United Linux is Here
pstreck writes "Red Hat watch out! Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux have made good on their promise and United Linux is here! According to their website 'United Linux is a standards-based Linux operating system targeted at the business user. It is developed, marketed and sold by an experienced partnership of Linux companies.'"
I just don't get it I guess, it just seems like there are already so many standards.
LINDON, Utah, PARAISO, Brazil, NUREMBERG, Germany, and BRISBANE, Calif. -May 30, 2002- Linux Industry leaders Caldera International, Inc. (Nasdaq: CALD), Conectiva S.A., SuSE Linux AG, and Turbolinux, Inc., today announced the organization of UnitedLinux, a new initiative that will streamline Linux development and certification around a global, uniform distribution of Linux designed for business. UnitedLinux addresses enterprise customers' need for a standard, business-focused Linux distribution that is certified to work across hardware and software platforms, accelerating the adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Under terms of the agreement, the four companies will collaborate on the development of one common core Linux operating environment, called UnitedLinux software. The four partners will each bundle value added products and services with the UnitedLinux operating system and the resulting offering will be marketed and sold by each of the four partners under their own brands.
Nearly every vendor supplying a piece of the technology infrastructure used by businesses has expressed support for UnitedLinux, including systems and software vendors AMD, Borland, Computer Associates, Fujitsu Siemens, Fujitsu Japan, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, NEC, and SAP. Independent hardware and software vendors spend considerable effort certifying their products and services on individual Linux distributions to ensure product compatibility for their customers. UnitedLinux will significantly diminish the number of distributions that vendors are asked to certify and will provide a true standards-based Linux operating environment.
Customers Benefit Through Unity
According to research firm IDC, a 2001 survey of 800 North American and Western European companies found that 40% of the respondents were either using or testing Linux in their organizations. UnitedLinux will help further speed enterprise adoption of Linux by providing businesses with a greater choice in the number of applications and hardware certified to work on the uniform version of Linux. Customers will also benefit from the global sales, localization, education, support and services that all four UnitedLinux vendors will collectively provide. The collaboration of the four leading Linux companies will result in an enterprise Linux offering, which is truly global by virtue of the companies' ability to provide local language support, training and professional services, in addition to the support of strategic partners. UnitedLinux will provide one unified Linux code base for IBM's complete eServer product line and AMD 32-bit and 64- bit platform and Intel's x86 32-bit and Itanium(tm) processor family platforms. UnitedLinux supports LSB, Li18nux, and GB18030 standards, as well as enabling installations in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages.
In addition UnitedLinux unleashes a massive research and development organization for Linux in the enterprise. Effectively, the four companies involved in this process will shift dollars and resources once allocated to creating and maintaining custom Linux operating environments and divert them to new R&D on Linux enterprise software. UnitedLinux is dedicated to bolstering the enterprise readiness of the platform, but in the same collaborative spirit from which Linux was founded and continues to flourish.
Participation and Availability
While today's announcement outlines the founding members of UnitedLinux, the initiative is open for additional Linux companies to participate. The four partners currently plan to each offer their own server products based on UnitedLinux by the end of 2002. For additional information on UnitedLinux, contact Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE or Turbolinux or go to www.unitedlinux.com.
About UnitedLinux
UnitedLinux is a standards-based, worldwide Linux solution targeted at the business user and developed by Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE, and Turbolinux. Designed to be an enterprise-class, industry-standard Linux operating system, UnitedLinux provides a single stable, uniform platform for application development, certification, and deployment, and allows Linux vendors, Independent Software Vendors, Independent Hardware Vendors, and Original Equipment Makers to support a single high value Linux offering. For more information, go to UnitedLinux.
Bummer.
So much for pre-announcing the product almost 1 year in advance :-(
It will called Suse 9 "(powered by UnitedLinux)". See page 11 of this PDF.
From the FAQ:
"Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE, and Turbolinux will collaborate on the development of the UnitedLinux distribution in order to provide migration pathes from their former releases to UnitedLinux. However, each UnitedLinux partner will still have its own Linux distribution that is "Powered by UnitedLinux." Existing long-term relationships with leading hardware and software companies - as well as the current UnitedLinux partners - guarantee the compatibility of UnitedLinux with relevant business solutions. HW and SW manufacturers have the opportunity to join the alpha and beta test circles, thus reassuring in an early stage that UnitedLinux supports their products."
If I read this correctly, it means that the future versions of SuSe, Connectiva, etc will be forks of the main United Linux distro.
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
If you actually took the time to check the website before asking the question, that is actually explained there:
Next Steps
* Each UnitedLinux partner continues to sell Linux under its familiar Linux brand and product, "Powered by UnitedLinux"
* Caldera OpenLinux "Powered by UnitedLinux"
* Conectiva Linux "Powered by UnitedLinux"
* SuSE Linux Enterprise Server "Powered by UnitedLinux"
* Turbolinux "Powered by UnitedLinux"
* One core development team benefiting several partners * Other Linux companies invited to join
Furthermore:
Competition
How will Linux companies in UnitedLinux still compete?
Pricing: Each company will set its own product pricing
Channels: Retail stores, reseller channels, direct, etc.
Support: Each company runs its own support team
Education: Independent training and certification
Professional Services: Custom implementations
Applications: Management, administration, messaging, etc.
OEM: Industry partners still choose products to bundle
Rather than yet another!!
Although in name they will all still exist. The will all be 'Powered by UnitedLinux' and have a couple of things tacked on. At the core they will be the same distribution. See page 11 of this PDF.
Of course, with a Q4 release, who is to know? As they say, the proof is in the pudding.
I will be more interested in this discussion when the 1.1 version of this new combined distro is released. I've not actually used any of these distros for any period of time. I purchased Caldera back in 1999, but found it to be weak, so I went back to RedHat.
It will be difficult for these guys to break into the business market unless what they have is really overwhelming--and their support has to really ROCK! I admin over 100 servers using Redhat 7.[12] now, and its very smooth. I don't look forward to having to rewrite my admin scripts for a new distro, get used to a new way of doing things, etc.
DFossmeister
---
Think your webhost is fast?! Check out mine.
No Not Again! Its whats for dinner.
Few question. How many of the current redhat/enterprise users are going to change the distro just because few competiting companies are now making up some standards ? Havent read anything about the case but.. what standards ? LSB ? Isnt redhat also supposed to follow that also ? blaah. This is just marketing hype...
yush
Emphasis and addition mine.
I think you will find that outside of America the picture is quite different, with SuSE and Mandrake doing well in Europe and TurboLinux doing well in the far east.
That quote belongs to Andrew S. Tanenbaum of Minix fame.
Seems it's too late at least for Dell
Strc prst skrz krk and vomit! Can help.
I suspect that they are releasing the administration tools under something very similar to the YaST2 license. More less you cannot redistribute for a fee but the source is avaialable. Considering how much this base package is likely to lean on SuSE configuration tools, that makes sense.
The real question at that point becomes do they drop the 'commericial use' clause and play a little harder with the user. While they are no where near HP Secure Linux, it would be playing a stronger hand than they have so far.
However, how can they restrict people from copying the ISOs?
One method would be to copyright the layout like Theo.
~~ What's stopping you?
I completely agree that competition is good. Standards aren't proven to be good by decree; they must be proven in a trial by fire. They must compete with other ideas and (marketing and politics aside) rise on their own merrits.
However, I think you're a bit off on your distro timeline. I seem to remember RedHat being the first push towards a commercial Linux distro. SUSE came down the line. Mandrake was a test of the Linux fabric - it started pretty much as RedHat with KDE (quickly differentiating itself with its own install apps, diskdrake, and other nifty contributions to the community). But RedHat was there first pushing in to the US market with business components the IT Industry has been used to seeing from a commercial OS vendor.
I am still a techie. I came from a Windows world and found myself quickly adapting to Unix when an opportunity presented itself. And I discovered that, for the most part, I preferred Unix. I found a degree of simplicity and power in "man foo.cfg" and "vi foo.cfg" that didn't exist in "clicky-clicky". But there was some learning curve and a suprising amount of philosophical change between the two. It comes to no suprise to me that Unix and Windows admins seem to talk two different languages and come from different cultures. Because they do.
Having said all that... sometimes a GUI is a nice tool to have. HP/UX and Solaris both had config GUIs that were nice to quickly churn out some common admin task (such as adding a couple users). But they were compatible with the old editing flat text files.
Linux offers that now - although different distros tend to favor different admin GUIs.
Having recently taken the Free Software Quiz, I can tell you that not only is "being online" not a requirement, but it is not even sufficient to fulfill the requirements of the GPL. From the GPL FAQ:
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I have been trialing GCC 3.1 and the C++ compilation is a major improvement over past version of GCC. Being C based the GNOME 1.4 and GNOME 2 libraries and most applications compiles and runs without too much hassle. However KDE 3.0.1 is somewhat more problematic, even when neither debugging support nor strict syntax checking is enabled..
This is not the fault of either the KDE or GCC developers. KDE was coded to support the "older" C++ style of pre GCC 2.9x and Microsoft's compilers and the GCC Team is following the new C99 & ISO 14882 C++ standards.
After kludgeing around the defects in the older GCC C++ template and library implementations, GCC 3.1 C++ is real joy to use. It makes it possible to program C++ in a completely new styles, that IMO can be far more productive.
It is difficult layering one type of programing style over another, the older C++ style libraries certainly make Windows programing a pain.
Would it not be better to wait for the KDE team to port KDE to a pure GCC 3.1/ISO 14882 style?
At the very least the debugging support is required for GCC's Profile Driven Optimizations which can greatly improve application performance.
GNOME 2.0 is due for release soon enough, at the very least the GNOME libraries and core should also be included at a United Linux "main component".
Actually, distributions also differentiate themselves by adding patches to things like glibc, GCC, and the kernel.
As I mentioned in "Red Hat's little forks," there are over 100 patches in kernel-2.4.18-4.src.rpm, including a 20 MB whopper from Alan Cox. As I recall, SuSE incorporated ReiserFS, JFS, and LVM before they were in the Linus kernel.
Wearing your optimistic programmer hat, it should still just work. Wearing the pessimistic hat of a user or a tester, it has to be retested. It will be interesting to see the extent to which a "Powered by UnitedLinux" distribution is allowed to add patches.
Rather than support 3 virtually bankrupt companies (not sure about Conectiva...) you only have to support one. Disagree with me there? Caldera's stock price is dismal at less than a $1 a share. SuSE had to be bailed out by IBM to the tune of millions of dollars. Turbolinux has laid off three quarters of thier staff. Each of these was a Slashdot story but I am too lazy to dig them up.
I see this as a last grasp to become profitable or at least remain solvent.
I don't know about current Distros, but Debian and Red Hat were the most compliant LSB distros.
The thing I hated about Caldera and SuSE was that they had such radically different file layouts that you could never install a RPM on them. Even now if you look at a lot of sf projects, you will see a seperate link for Suse rpms, yet the RH ones work fine with MDK.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
And that's why they will loose.
SuSE may be a fine distribution -- but only for beginners. The YAST system sucks as it destroys all hand-made configuration changes when running it again. They said that SuSE is the leader in Europe - thats not true at all! SuSE is the leader in germany, but when they try to continue their kind of developing (SuSE Linux is even not a GPL Linux!!) they will also loose.
Many companies in Europe sold Server Systems with pre-installed SuSE the last few years, but many of them switched to Debian or RedHat as lots of the customers asked for it.
And I **hate** to see on many download pages pre-compiled binarys "xxxx.rpm for Slackware/RedHat, yyyy.rpm for SuSE". WHY is SuSE trying to make its own standard? There is still another company in Redmond trying that. We don't need such thing in the Linux world !!