Unity of purpose
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Open source software companies have struggled to work out how to make money from selling free software. The UnitedLinux initiative may be one solution.
During 1999, open source software companies received millions of dollars in venture capital funding. But, carried away with the enthusiasm of the high-tech boom, optimistic investors rarely asked executives at these companies how they hoped to make money out of selling ostensibly 'free' software.
It is a problem open source suppliers continue to wrestle with. Even Red Hat struggles to turn a profit, despite its market leadership in enterprise Linux server operating systems. Others have slashed costs and sought to restructure their businesses. And most depend on sales from the provision of training, implementation and support services for users of their Linux distributions. Yet there are still more than 250 different Linux distributions to choose from today.
It is against this backdrop that the UnitedLinux initiative was first mooted by Caldera CEO Ransom Love in late 2001, in response to what he
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Love's idea appealed to at least three other Linux vendors. In May 2002, Caldera, SuSE, Conectiva and TurboLinux formed the UnitedLinux alliance. Its proposed UnitedLinux distribution will be based on SuSE's technology (see box, The UnitedLinux distribution).
Participants will contribute additional, specialist knowledge to the basic UnitedLinux distribution, such as TurboLinux's Asian language support. The cost of development will be split equally among UnitedLinux's members — a potential source of future conflict.
The basic distribution will be sold under participants' own brand names, but will be labelled "powered by UnitedLinux", and UnitedLinux members will be free to bundle their own technology on top of that. For example, Caldera plans to sell its distribution with its own clustering technology.
They will also be able to adopt different pricing models. Whereas Caldera intends to charge on a per-seat basis – in line with traditional software licensing models – SuSE will continue to charge for the software package alone, but will also sell add-on support contracts.
Underlying the UnitedLinux initiative is a set of standards intended to help software vendors produce applications that can be set-up as easily on Linux as they can on any proprietary operating system.
These include the Linux Standards Base (LSB) specification, as well as the Linux kernel release (the core of the Linux operating system), the file libraries included in the specification, and file system layouts so that files can easily be found.
At present, software vendors either sell an application tried, tested and certified for a particular distribution, or they produce source code that users compile themselves for the distribution of their choice. This has acted as a barrier to more widespread Linux usage in the enterprise, say analysts.
"There's more than 250 Linux distributions and we are always faced with the question of which ones we should test and who we should support," says Judy Chavis, director of the Linux program office at Hewlett-Packard (HP).
Furthermore, the geographic distribution of the prime movers behind UnitedLinux means that the operating system will enjoy broad, global support. Turbo Linux and SuSE are the acknowledged market leaders in Japan and Europe respectively, while Caldera and Conectiva are strong in North and South America.
Nor is the alliance closed: Both MandrakeSoft and Red Hat have been invited to join and although Red Hat has turned down the invitation, MandrakeSoft will probably have little choice but to join or at least conform to the UnitedLinux specification. And while UnitedLinux does not intend to set down standards for desktop Linux – only server software – it seems inconceivable that vendors will not adopt the same standards for desktop Linux, where applicable.
The analyst consensus is that only hardcore Linux enthusiasts are likely to oppose the initiative, and they can always adopt Debian, Gentoo, Slackware or 250 other distributions if they really do not like UnitedLinux — or engineer their own distribution.
