Linux Vendors Announce Plans to Unite

[Macguru]

Four Linux companies announced plans Thursday to create a common business version of the open source operating system. Industry leader Red Hat, however, was not among them.

[biz.yahoo.com...]

[cyril kearney]

I think that is great news. The Linux community will be greatly enhanced by a standard offering. Too bad Red Hat isn't involved.

[EliteWeb]

RedHat has always been like that though wanting to be indipendant Im sure they have plans up their own sleeves :)

[littleman]

:) I wouldn't call four distributions a united front.

Distrowatch [distrowatch.com] is a great place to read about all the Linux variants.

[heini]

The UL - United Linux - initiative is directed towards using Linux in business environments mostly. The aim is to set a quasi standard for developers.
Certifiability is another goal of the Group.
Support comes from giants like IBM or SUN. The initiative said it already invited Redhat and other distributors to join.

The whitepaper on the groups site makes for an interesting read:
www.unitedlinux.com/en/whitepapers/misc/whitepaper_ul.pdf

[littleman]

They mentioned that they invited redhat to join, but I think they new full well that redhat would refuse.

The four distros mentioned are RPM based, they are also relatively small compared to the girth of Redhat. From a business perspective I see this as a way that these four smaller vendors cold chip away at redhat dominance.

I can't see distributions like gentoo, slackware, and debian jumping on board.

I think it is a good idea, but I really just see it as a way to develop a standard that is not redhat, a way to combine market shares to collectively tackle the big kid in the playground.

More reading:
[vnunet.com...]
[it-director.com...]

[Duckula]

This is not quite a big surprise. Caldera (SCO) and Conectiva are already quite small fishes. Turbolinux was big on the oriental market, but its finances have been taking a plunge lately.

Suse is a somewhat big german company, I'd say the strongest of the coalition.

I'd call that coalition a way to heal the finances of comercially weak companies.