THE UNITED COLORS OF LINUX

Will this union be another useless ACE or a Linux winning hand? Look at the fame and fortunes of the four players before you decide.

 
  by Bill Weinberg,  Strategy Director at MontaVista Software  
     
 

Linux distributors SuSE, Turbolinux, Caldera, and Conectiva last week announced their move to back a common distribution called UnitedLinux. Each UnitedLinux-branded distribution will comply with the Free Standards Group's Linux Standard Base project. LSB is particularly important for server distributions in that it guarantees the placement of files in particular directories. This in turn eases the burden on developers building systems management applications.

North meets South, East meets West –United Linux brings together regional and boutique Linux players SuSE, Turbolinux, Conectiva, and Caldera. With a single technology base derived from SuSE, for the most part, this confederation promises to improve efficiencies by cutting duplicate R&D, to reduce the threat of fragmentation, and to counter the dominance of Red Hat. 

 
             
   

ACE Was Not the Place

In 1991, the Advanced Computing Environment initiative was spearheaded by Mips and Digital and backed by a consortium of computer manufacturers. It sought to unify interfaces via a HAL that would enable portability of Windows NT and different versions of Unix across a wide variety of CPUs (i.e., it would make Alpha and the Mips CPUs competitive with Intel's Pentium processor). In turn ACE played a role in the genesis of OSF and everyone hoped for a unified Unix. Unfortunately neither ACE, nor Mips, nor Digital survived.

http://www.att.com/press/1091/911010.ula.html
http://www.illuminata.com/public/content/intlunix/intlunix3.htm

    

Unfortunately, amid the hoopla, UnitedLinux feels a lot like the ACE initiative to unify Unix in the early 90s. I keep asking myself a very basic question –Will the value-add of the four sovereign software companies going into the confederation be enhanced or diminished as they position themselves as member states? Let’s examine the fame and fortunes of the four franchisees.

SuSE, Turbolinux and Conectiva all bring the local touch to the union. SuSE has its Euro-German base and pan-European savoir faire. Turbolinux has its Asian language orientation, and Brazilian Conectiva carries a Latin focus on Portuguese and Spanish. http://www.open-mag.com/2643683279.htm

As for technological strengths, SuSE brings a well-deserved reputation for technical excellence on both the server and the desktop. Conectiva makes substantial contributions to Linux kernel technology (including employing Marcelo Tosati, the anointed 2.4 kernel maintainer).

  
     
 

What’s missing from the assessment? Caldera. On both regional and technical levels, Caldera is the one member that seems to have less to offer than to gain. While theoretically able to muster the former international might of SCO, and always eager to haul out laurels in the desktop space, Caldera today does not bring any local market dominance to the fledgling union and is less relevant as a distribution supplier.

Not that the other players are without minuses. In Asia, especially in China, Turbolinux, cannot compete with local, government-sanctioned players like Red Flag. SuSE, although still enjoying decent share in the U.S., is still weakly positioned outside fortress Europe after closing down shop in North and South America early last year.

In the final analysis, UnitedLinux will benefit users, IT departments, and developers by providing a quality, internationalized, standard Linux distribution. What the world loses in choice among distributions it will recover with a solid alternative to Red Hat.

While UnitedLinux will benefit users and developers, will the companies gain much?

Actually, Turbo and Caldera have little to gain except reduced engineering efforts. They may have lots to lose in terms of differentiation.

 
             
 

Conectiva is doing fairly well, despite the ongoing malaise in Latin America, with a small but steady share of the estimated $3 billion software market in Brazil, and nascent business in Chile, Mexico, and Argentina. Since Conectiva competes more with SuSE than with Red Hat, the union will help them by letting them subsume SuSE, or possibly but not probably diminish their differentiation from SuSE. Conectiva can gain by leveraging the gringo effect, that despite pride in local quality and added value, an underlying inferiority complex favors foreign brands. Unlike the other United Linux players, Conectiva positions itself as a services, not products company. While their localized product won respect, they paid their bills with integration, support, and consulting.

As for SuSE, they surely gain in prestige as the core technical contributors to United Linux. Whether the union opens up opportunities for them, or enables the other United Linux members to shut them out of local markets commercially, remains to be seen,

    

Who Brings What to UnitedLinux

Conectiva     Small but steady share of the estimated $3 billion software market in Brazil; nascent business in Chile, Mexico, and Argentina; substantial contributions to Linux kernel technology

SuSE             Reputation for technical excellence on server and desktop; Euro-German base

Turbolinux   Asian language orientation

Caldera         ? Bill Weinberg raises the question mark