The Four Hundred

Four big commercial Linux distributors ganged up last week to do what should have been done years ago: create a single Linux distribution that is certified across the widest variety of desktop, workstation, and server platforms. Caldera International, Conectiva, SuSE, and Turbolinux essentially want to commercialize the Linux Standard Base, or LSB, specification of Linux, and get all of the Linux vendors, including Red Hat, to use it, so they can all focus on providing auxiliary programs and services that run on this UnitedLinux distribution.

The founders of the UnitedLinux partnership have not excluded Red Hat, MandrakeSoft, Redflag Software, Sun Microsystems (which shipped over 100,000 Linux-based server appliances last year), and others from the UnitedLinux initiative. All Linux distributors, large and small alike, have been invited to participate, so they can share the burden of creating a certified Linux distribution that they can warp their value adds and services around.

The fact that the Unix operating system never unified, because the two major camps, represented by Unix International and Open Software Foundation, could never agree on APIs, much less create a single source version of Unix, haunts the Linux distributors. And it should. Caldera (a spinoff from Novell), Conectiva (a big Brazilian Linux distributor), SuSE (which is big in Europe, particularly in Germany), and Turbolinux (which has a good hold on the Asian market) are at least doing something about the precarious proliferation of Linux distributions. The proliferation of Linux distributions, according to the argument being made by the founders of the UnitedLinux partnership, is that the processes involved in getting so many distributions certified is limiting the adoption of Linux. What seems more likely to be true is that Red Hat, which accounts for more than half of commercial Linux shipments, is the one Linux that most vendors want to certify their hardware on, and it is harder to get vendors to certify all the others, except in specific markets--SuSE in Germany, Mandrake in France, Turbolinux in Japan, for instance. This means that big vendors and resellers that span geographies have to cope with multiple Linuxes that are different in small yet significant ways. It would be easier, smarter, and more profitable for all parties to work together on a single, unified Linux code base.

UnitedLinux is, for the moment, based on the SuSE Enterprise Server edition of the Linux 2.4 kernel and will have extensions that mirror those in the Caldera, Conectiva, and Turbolinux distributions. It will have a single, open-source code base that anyone can download, but a compiled binary version of UnitedLinux will only be available through distribution partners and resellers affiliated with UnitedLinux participants. UnitedLinux is keen on supporting the Linux Standards Base reference specification for Linux that is being championed by Red Hat, and it wants to create the single implementation of that spec that will, in turn, be sold and supported by UnitedLinux partners and the server and workstation vendors that want to support one, and only one, version of Linux. To get Red Hat on board, UnitedLinux may have to make a number of concessions such as standardizing on the Red Hat distributions or giving Red Hat more control over how the LSB spec is implemented in UnitedLinux. Red Hat may simply never join.

The alpha version of the UnitedLinux distribution will be available before the end of the second quarter of 2002. The beta version will be available in the third quarter, and UnitedLinux 1.0 will be available in the fourth quarter from these four founding partners in UnitedLinux. UnitedLinux will be supported on 32-bit Pentium and 64-bit Itanium processors from Intel, on 32-bit Athlon and 64-bit Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, and on IBM's full eServer product line. This includes IBM's Power-based iSeries and pSeries servers as well as its Intel-based xSeries server line and its zSeries mainframes. UnitedLinux supports the LSB, Li18nux, and GB18030 standards, which, among other things, specify how to deal with currency, character set, language, and other internationalization issues within Linux. UnitedLinux will be available in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. UnitedLinux partners will sell the Linux operating system under their current names with "powered by UnitedLinux" attached to it.