Lindon, UT; Curitiba, Brazil; Nurenberg, Germany; and Brisbane, CA — (press release excerpt) — Linux industry leaders Caldera International, Inc., Conectiva S.A., SuSE Linux AG, and Turbolinux, Inc., today announced the organization of UnitedLinux, a new initiative that will streamline Linux development and certification around a global, uniform distribution of Linux designed for business.

UnitedLinux addresses enterprise customers' need for a standard, business-focused Linux distribution that is certified to work across hardware and software platforms, accelerating the adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Under terms of the agreement, the four companies will collaborate on the development of one common core Linux operating environment, called UnitedLinux software. The four partners will each bundle value added products and services with the UnitedLinux operating system and the resulting offering will be marketed and sold by each of the four partners under their own brands.

Nearly every vendor supplying a piece of the technology infrastructure used by businesses has expressed support for UnitedLinux, including systems and software vendors AMD, Borland Software Corporation, Computer Associates, Fujitsu Siemens, Fujitsu Japan, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, NEC, Progress Software, and SAP. Independent hardware and software vendors spend considerable effort certifying their products and services on individual Linux distributions to ensure product compatibility for their customers. UnitedLinux will significantly diminish the number of distributions that vendors are asked to certify and will provide a true standards-based Linux operating environment.

According to research firm IDC, a 2001 survey of 800 North American and Western European companies found that 40% of the respondents were either using or testing Linux in their organizations. UnitedLinux will help further speed enterprise adoption of Linux by providing businesses with a greater choice in the number of applications and hardware certified to work on the uniform version of Linux. Customers will also benefit from the global sales, localization, education, support and services that all four UnitedLinux vendors will collectively provide.

The collaboration of the four leading Linux companies will result in an enterprise Linux offering, which is truly global by virtue of the companies' ability to provide local language support, training and professional services, in addition to the support of strategic partners. UnitedLinux will provide one unified Linux code base for IBM's complete eServer product line, AMD's current 32-bit and forthcoming 64-bit AMD Athlon and AMD Opteron processor-based platforms, and Intel's x86 32-bit and Itanium processor family platforms. UnitedLinux supports LSB, Li18nux, and GB18030 standards, as well as enabling installations in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages.

In addition UnitedLinux unleashes a massive research and development organization for Linux in the enterprise. Effectively, the four companies involved in this process will shift dollars and resources once allocated to creating and maintaining custom Linux operating environments and divert them to new R&D on Linux enterprise software.

UnitedLinux is dedicated to bolstering the enterprise readiness of the platform, but in the same collaborative spirit from which Linux was founded and continues to flourish.

While today's announcement outlines the founding members of UnitedLinux, the initiative is open for additional Linux companies to participate.

The four partners currently plan to each offer their own server products based on UnitedLinux by the end of 2002.

Additional UnitedLinux links . . .

• FAQ
  
• presentation (pdf download)
  
• technical whitepaper (pdf download)

 
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