Choose your side. The Linux community seems to be breaking up and judging by recent announcements, the battle lines have already been drawn.
It started at the beginning of the month with the announcement of UnitedLinux, a joint venture between Caldera, SuSE, TurboLinux and Connectiva, that aims to develop what they term a "business-focused" Linux distribution.
The fact that we now have SuSE Linux, a giant European Linux distributor, facing off with giant US distributor Red Hat is not all that surprising.
Alastair Otter, journalist, ITWeb
Just days later Red Hat, possibly the best-known Linux distributor, teamed up with Dell and Oracle to announce a renewed commitment to "enterprise Linux", as well as a range of Red Hat-optimised hardware and software. This is not Red Hat`s first move; it has consistently been building alliances with high-end hardware and software vendors, and readying itself for the battle ahead.
The fact that we now have SuSE Linux, a giant European Linux distributor, facing off with giant US distributor Red Hat is not all that surprising. It has been a long time coming and for quite a while now even the smallest of application developers have been packaging their software for one or the other platform. The problem that most developers currently face is that file system layout differences between the two vendors is significant enough that an application that installs on one version will not necessarily do so on the other.
It is a situation that has thrown up a number of hurdles to vendors hoping to move into the business arena, not only because of the SuSE and Red Hat differences, but also because of the never-ending configurations found in all of the 100-plus Linux distributions that are available in the market.
Testing software against just a couple of these distributions is hard enough with the result that no application developer can ever truly say their software is Linux compatible.
Clearly the UnitedLinux venture is trying to overcome some of these hurdles in order for business to start seeing Linux as a usable and viable option. By presenting a common base system throughout the distributions, it becomes increasingly easier for developers to certify against these distributions. So in theory, an application that installs on SuSE will automatically install on Caldera, TurboLinux and Connectiva without any problem. At least that`s the plan for the first full distribution planned for the end of this year.
Is the UnitedLinux venture a good idea? In general, yes. From a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense because in theory more and more IT managers are now going to be able to recommend the software to their boards with confidence, which in turn means that larger quantities of software will be sold. Is it good for smaller distributors who are not part of one or the other alliance? Doubtful. Unless you`re a hobbyist or a philanthropist with cash to burn, being incompatible with one or the other of these two Linux behemoths is going to be bad for business in the long run.
It is an often-quoted analogy that points to the plethora of Unix distributions that existed in the early days of computing. Ten or twenty years down the line, there are only a few variants of Unix left. Linux will undoubtedly go the same route in the next couple of years, which is not necessarily a bad thing if it encourages wider use of a stable core set of distributions.
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