[Wolves] united sco more

[James Turner]

On Saturday 24 Jan 2004 9:17 am, sparkes wrote:

> It seems that because SCO wouldn't leave united linux novell has pulled
> the SuSe team out.  They are fed up of doing all the work while one the
> biggest members of the consortium was busy trying to kill linux.
>
> How will this hurt linux, if at all?
>
> Where does this leave smaller companies that where part of united
> linux?  Was united linux ever united?

TurboLinux is/was a partnership between Conectiva, TurboLinux, SuSE and The 
SCO Group. Each retained considerable leeway to "do their own thing" in terms 
of adding to the common UnitedLinux base, so the degree of unity was always 
somewhat questionable.

Their plan as I understood it was to produce a set of standard "baseline" OS 
components around Linux, to which each of the member companies would add 
further software in order to make their own products. Building upon efforts 
such as the Linux Standard Base (LSB), they aimed to share the development 
effort while producing a high degree of compatibility between their different 
distributions.

IIRC, typically the first CD of a "Powered by UnitedLinux" distro would 
contain base components common to all the partner companies, with subsequent 
discs carrying vendor-specific add-ons to the base product.

The UnitedLinux web site (www.unitedlinux.com) seems to indicate that version 
1.0 is still current, despite being released way back (by Linux standards) in 
November 2002! I must admin always having been rather dubious of this 
project, and the way things are going I have serious doubts that any later 
version will ever see the light of day.

I presume the partner companies (with the exception of our friends at SCO) 
will return to maintaining their distributions independently again. Perhaps a 
new collaboration initiative will take place at some point in the future... 
who knows.

James