[lug] United Linux

[rm at fabula.de]

On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 09:13:18AM -0600, Crawford Rainwater wrote:
> This is a combined effort of Caldera, SuSE, Turbo,
> and Conectiva distributions.
> 
> >From Slashdot.org, the link is
> http://www.unitedlinux.com
> 
> This finally confirms the rumor I picked up from the
> LinuxWorld Expo in NYC earlier this year.  It seems
> this effort is to compete against RedHat on the
> business stage.
> 
> Feel free to read and comment.

Hmm, most of the companies they quote i'd personally 
rather put into the 'turn-me-of' corner :-)
Borland ("... a leading provider of Linux development
environments  ..."), aren't those the ones who, in interviews
in German Linux magazines, complained about how system calls
where wrong (because Win does them different and they somehow
didn't realize it and then their wounderfull compiler wouldn't
work without rerwriting  ...). If i ever saw one stomp over a 
whole comunity it was them.
HP - they should have written what some HP-Technicians told
me about my "toy-OS" a year or two ago.
NEC: a friend of mine bought a rather expensive NEC-LCD display
with digital interface. After month of phone calls to tech support
to find out such basic things as screen refresh rate, hsync and vsinc
("we won't talk to you. Our monitor only supports Windows 95 and later ...")
he's still running it as a framebuffer device.
Progress: ask the people at MySQL ;-)

Ok, enough rant, let's get serious: what do they try to acomplish that
isn't addressed by the Linux Standards Base? "ISVs and IHVs can now 
concentrate on one single major business Linux distribution ..." is ex-
actly what i don't want to hear. My OS is _Linux_, not SuSE, RedHat, KRUD
or Debian (my distro is Debian). I'm allready get mad if all i can get are
RPMs. 
"Instead of certifying to multiple distributions of Linux ..." -
what is this certification about? If you are a hardware vendor you need
to enshure that your driver will work with different kernel versions
(nothing to do with distro), as a software vendor you need to enshure
your application(s) are installed in the right place and can find the
neccessary libs and configuration files - a problem addressed by the LSB.
On a larger scale this smells a bit like thinimg out of a market, some-
thing i consider bad for the open source comunity. Diversity has allways
been an inspiration (look at _how_ much of linux is "borrowed" from other
Oses). I love my Debian but would never dream of putting it on a beginners
box. I have an alpha, a Sparc  and a PowerPC, will UnitedLinux support it ? Most
likely not look at SuSE and Sparc (or how old their PPC port is).

We need diverse players from different comunities - friendly competition
(on all levels) is good for the software quality. 

   Ralf Mattes
> Sincerely,
> 
> Crawford Rainwater
> CEO and Consultant
> 
> The I.T.E.C. Company
> P.M.B. 146
> 368 South McCaslin Boulevard
> Louisville, CO 80027 USA
> (303) 604-2550 (voice)
> (866) 604-2550 (toll free)
> (303) 664-0036 (fax)
> http://www.itec-co.com
> 
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