When Linux was booming along with the Internet and the high-tech economy in the late 1990s, the four main sellers of Linux were Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera and Turbolinux. Each signed support agreements with IBM, critical steps in granting serious credibility to the comparatively young operating system that began in 1991 as the hobby of Linus Torvalds, then a computer science student. Boosted by an open-source programming method that let companies collaborate and drew swarms of loyal programmers to the cause, Linux rose to the point where Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer named it the company's No. 1 threat. Now times have become more desperate. Start-ups such as Mission Critical Linux and Linuxcare faltered. SuSE and Caldera have undergone job cuts and reorganisations, while Turbolinux has refocused on higher-level software. Even Red Hat has only flirted with profitability, with $79m in revenue for its fiscal year ended 28 February. Linux companies, like all others, now scrape for every computing dollar spent and take any measure possible to eke out an advantage over competitors. Out of this dire environment, UnitedLinux was born. UnitedLinux pools some resources while giving much of the technological control to SuSE -- a recognition of the reality that SuSE was the only Linux seller that had a development staff with depth comparable to Red Hat's. "I almost don't consider Caldera and Turbolinux to be in the Linux distribution business anymore," said Aberdeen analyst Bill Claybrook. Indeed, the combined efforts from the other companies will boost SuSE's development staff only by about one-third, said Holger Dyroff, director of North American sales for SuSE and the company's former chief executive. The first version of UnitedLinux, set to debut early in the last quarter of this year, will essentially be the next version of SuSE's advanced server edition augmented with other companies' features, Dyroff said. Those improvements include better support for Asian language characters from Turbolinux and basic "failover" software from Conectiva, which lets one server take over when another fails. SuSE's work to gain all-important certification from hardware and software companies will carry through to the UnitedLinux version, Dyroff said. With UnitedLinux, each company will sell the same base package of Linux -- the kernel at the heart of the software and several higher-level software packages such as user interfaces and configuration tools. They will differentiate in marketing and sales techniques, adding their own components such as Caldera's Volution or Turbolinux's PowerCockpit management software. While the companies are pooling developers and research funding, each will keep revenue from the products and services it sells, Dyroff said. To succeed, UnitedLinux will have to avoid problems that have waylaid prior consortia in which competitors cooperate, IDC's Kusnetzky said. "Who's managing this? Is this going to turn out to be a waltz for four people?" he asked. "Without any management, this looks to me exactly like the unification efforts of the Unix community in the 1980s, the ACE Initiative. There were a whole bunch of players, no clear leader and a wonderful, dramatic announcement that resulted in no products." AT&T's ACE Initiative in 1991 sought to unify interfaces that higher-level programs would use to communicate with different versions of Unix, but the move failed to fix the fragmented Unix market. UnitedLinux, by contrast, uses identical Linux software at its foundation, not merely compatible versions of Unix. Who will gain?
SuSE increased its revenue 40 percent to $35m in 2001 and believes the UnitedLinux effort will let the company achieve its goal to increase revenue a further 25 to 30 percent in 2002, Dyroff said. Conectiva hopes to gain wider support by tapping into UnitedLinux' certification by major software and hardware companies "that are mainly outside our reach," a Conectiva representative said in a conference call on Thursday. "This will strengthen our capability to deal with large projects." The biggest beneficiaries, though, probably won't be the UnitedLinux members but rather companies that currently are hobbled by having to support a wide number of Linux versions. "For us, life is going to be much easier because of UnitedLinux," said Joseph Reger, chief technology officer of Fujitsu-Siemens, which has to sell its products with different versions of Linux for different geographical areas. IBM and Hewlett-Packard, the two largest server sellers, each said they'd support UnitedLinux while making it clear Red Hat isn't losing out. "Our platforms going forward will be Red Hat and UnitedLinux," said Judy Chavez, director of HP's Linux programme office. UnitedLinux helps HP achieve Linux support with partners such as Oracle, BEA Systems and SAP, she said. "IBM will fully support UnitedLinux across our entire portfolio of hardware and software and services," said Scott Handy, director for Linux software solutions at IBM, adding immediately, "We will continue to support Red Hat aggressively across the same portfolio." Unfortunately, making Linux easier for software and hardware companies to support, and therefore for customers to buy, might actually backfire for UnitedLinux. "The more Linux gets accepted in the enterprise, the bigger advantage Red Hat has," Aberdeen's Claybrook said. "If Linux moves into the enterprise 50 percent faster, then Red Hat is going to gain 75 percent of the advantage."
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