Caldera, Connectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux today announced UnitedLinux, a joint initiative that they hope will streamline Linux development and certification around a uniform distribution of Linux designed for business users.
Announcing UnitedLinux locally this morning, Mark Knight, Caldera`s regional manager for Africa and the Middle East, said: "Fragmentation within the Linux industry is holding back corporate adoption ... with more than 100 distributions of the operating system available to the market.
"UnitedLinux addresses enterprise customers` need for a standard, business-focused Linux distribution that is certified to work across hardware and software platforms, accelerating the adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Under the terms of the agreement, the four companies will collaborate on the development of one common core Linux operating environment, called UnitedLinux software."
The companies participating in the UnitedLinux initiative will continue to market their own brand of Linux, although the core operating system will be the same across all brands. "We will essentially sell the same core product but compete on value-adds," said Knight. The initiative is not designed to eliminate either of the individual brands but will allow the companies to "pool development resources".
"Independent hardware and software vendors spend considerable effort certifying their products and services on individual Linux distributions to ensure product compatibility for their customers. UnitedLinux will significantly diminish the number of distributions that vendors are asked to certify and will provide a true standards-based Linux operating environment."
In the first of a series of global announcements of UnitedLinux planned for the coming days, Knight said: "UnitedLinux is also good news for those South African companies that are considering a move to Linux for all or part of their businesses as it will help further speed enterprise adoption of Linux by providing a greater choice in the number of applications and hardware certified to work on the uniform version of Linux. Customers will also benefit from the global sales, localisation, education, support and services that all four UnitedLinux vendors will collectively provide."
UnitedLinux will be developed around standards such as the Linux Standard Base, Li18nux and GB18030.
Knight said UnitedLinux is open to participation from other Linux companies.
UnitedLinux plans to release alpha versions of its product in the third quarter of this year with the first full version planned for the end of the year.
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