Is UnitedLinux Violating The GPL?

mmayberry writes "NewsForge has posted an article, UnitedLinux might not be very GPL-friendly. With a closed beta that includes an NDA, UL may be on the verge of angering a large part of their target market. You'd think that the likes of Suse, Turbo, SCO, and Conectiva would get the point by now..."

Comments

Why UnitedLinux is doomed

[Walter Bell]

Having worked in the past for a large Linux company as an evangelist and valuation forecaster, I can assure you that UnitedLinux has a bleak future. However, it is not because of the GPL or any other reasons that most often get mentioned on Slashdot. The weaknesses of this coalition go far beyond licensing issues. To start, let's take a look at the founders:

• SCO. Formerly "Caldera," the one Linux company who released their distribution as crippleware as they tried to compete with dozens of other vendors who gave their distros away for Free. You can see where this is heading. Caldera is run by a bunch of Ivy League suits who think that the old fashioned business ideas of monopoly, per-seat licensing games, and control over the source code can easily be used to sell a Linux distribution. SCO has an abundance of clue, but unfortunately it all left the company when they laid off the Unixware developers.
• TurboLinux. Are they even still alive? I have many friends who are Linux geniuses (one of them is the president of the local LUG) and none of them know anybody who runs TurboLinux, much less pays for it. The simplistic reasoning behind this is that if somebody wants to run RedHat 3.0, they will just download a copy of RedHat 3.0, instead of buying it from TurboLinux.
• Connectiva. This is another pointless Linux distribution. The one advantage that Connectiva has is that their VCs did not wise up as quickly as other VCs did, to the fact that they produce nothing of value. Everything that Connectiva offers is done better by some other distribution.
• SuSE. The distribution that prides itself on a half-baked, closed-source installer and too many installation CDs to count is also a distribution that has no future. Mandrake has usurped the European market and most other potential SuSE users, simply by virtue of being a better distribution. SuSE once earned a bright yellow star in my book for funding so much research and Linux development projects, but nowadays the only such project they have left is ReiserFS and that is so unstable that even Gentoo (!) recommends against its use.

Now, now that we can see that every company that is a major part of UnitedLinux is doomed, let's take a look at the other stumbling blocks that they will face before they each go bankrupt:

• UnitedLinux aims to make money off the backs of the best developers. The UnitedLinux coalition, unable to cobble together a decent distribution of their own, fully intends to pilfer the best features of Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, and Gentoo Linuces, and then add a tiny bit of closed-source software to make their distro difficult to copy legally. This is unethical and violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the GPL.
• UnitedLinux lacks a good package manager. As a so-called "cracker," package management is *the* most important thing I consider when I choose a distribution. Debian has dpkg/apt (which is excellent, if you are lazy enough to use binaries). FreeBSD and Gentoo have their superior ports trees, which make bug fixes a cinch. And Mandrake has its own proprietary system, which is also great. UL has none of the three, and will rely on the outdated and frequently annoying RPM system. Shame on them.
• UnitedLinux has no business support. Businesses prefer to get things for free instead of paying for them, so it is no wonder why my company tells us to head to linuxiso.org instead of UL when we need a new Linux CD.

In summary: I will not be sad to see UnitedLinux die. It is a terrible idea whose day of reckoning has arrived.