Linux companies team up against Red Hat

By Phil Hochmuth
Network World Linux in the Enterprise Newsletter, 06/03/02

In a move aimed squarely at Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, SuSE and Conectiva last week announced their plan to create UnitedLinux - a common version of the open source operating system that the companies will develop together but market separately.

UnitedLinux is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year from the four vendors, and will run on Intel's 32- and 64-bit architectures, as well as IBM's zSeries, iSeries and pSeries of midrange and mainframe computers.

The four companies involved with UnitedLinux say the distribution will be based primarily on SuSE's server version of Linux and will incorporate device drivers, clustering utilities, administration tools and language-support options from all of the contributing companies. SuSE will handle most of the integration work.

Major IT vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Computer Associates all jumped to endorse the new UnitedLinux distribution, each claiming that they will support and integrate the platform along with their respective Red Hat Linux products and services.

UnitedLinux will be targeted solely at business users as a server operating system and there are no plans for a retail version for individual PC users. UnitedLinux source code will be made freely available under the GNU Public License, the common open-source licensing model that allows customers access to source code and grants permission to install software on multiple machines. Executable versions of UnitedLinux will be sold at prices to be determined by each of the four companies. The four companies will be price UnitedLinux on an individual basis.

While the move could be seen as an attempt by the four Linux distributors to get market share and revenue away from Red Hat, the leading Linux company made this comment:

" 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, " according to a written statement from Red Hat. " Time will tell if the [UnitedLinux] group's distribution will achieve the same level of support " that Red Hat offers today.