Mandriva, Turbolinux enter Linux alliance

Forgive me if I sound skeptical, but during the nine years I've covered Linux, not once have I seen a favorable outcome to the partnership of the type Mandriva and Turbolinux announced Wednesday.

Tokyo-based Turbolinux and Paris-based Mandriva said they'll unify their products to use a common base system in an endeavor called Manbo-Labs. The first software to employ this base will be Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, the companies said.

"By pooling together common engineering resources, Mandriva and Turbolinux will be able to invest more in technology and product quality," the companies said in a statement. This should help expand the list of compatible hardware and lead to stronger relationships with software and hardware companies, the Linux sellers predicted.

(Credit: Linux)

This sort of partnership makes sense in a world where much of the software that goes into a Linux distribution is already shared. But in the past, such alliances haven't amounted to much.

One prominent example is UnitedLinux in 2002, which pooled the resources of Suse Linux (before Novell acquired it four years ago), Turbolinux (which earlier had aspirations beyond just its current Japanese market focus), Conectiva (which merged with Mandrake to become Mandriva), and The SCO Group (which previously had been named Caldera before it switched from selling Linux to selling Unix and suing Linux advocates). But the effort to provide a collective counterbalance to Red Hat's dominance fell apart, and the UnitedLinux lights went out in 2004.

Then there was the Linux Core Consortium in 2004, which was essentially UnitedLinux reconstituted without Suse and with another company, Progeny Linux. It also didn't amount to much.

More recently, several allies whose products were based on the Debian Linux distribution also tried banding together as the Debian Common Core (DCC) Alliance. Other members of that group included now-defunct Progeny Linux, Knoppix, Xandros, Linspire, Mepis, Credativ, GnuLinEx, Sun Wah, and User Linux.

[maverick_nick]

Open source won't succeed.

When are people going to realize that open source doesn't make business sense. Sure it's great to give stuff away for free, but is it sensible to think that you can fuel a corporation on support and services?

Look, the problem isn't that the source is freely available. OS consumers really can't do much with the source. The only people whom care about the source are the developers and not companies or individuals whom purchase operating systems. Linux needs to be licensed in a more traditional sense. If you want open source to succeed you need to charge for the ******** binaries.

Right now Linux isn't competing with Windows, it's competing with itself. Imagine if all of the developers whom work on various flavors of Linux aligned to work on one uber edition, for one uber company. Just imagine.

[dragonbite]

Prehistoric

Do you really believe this or are you just trying to be a target and get some people riled up? This has been argued over and over again, go look for it. Google is your friend.

If you want something that works like Microsoft, smells like Microsoft, licenses like Microsoft and monopolizes like Microsoft.. then use Microsoft.

Linux's biggest advantage is CHOICE, the problem is most users don't know what it is or how to use it.

[The_Decider]

Too bad

You don't understand that OSS collectively is a multi-billion dollar business.

I guess you haven't heard that more and more companies are not only using OSS, but are investing in it and buying it.

The various distros are not really a problem. Out of the tens of thousands of software available for Linux, only a small handful are specific to a distro and can't run elsewhere.

There are a few general purpose distros, but most fill a specific niche. It is not a weakness but a strength.

In short, you might want to learn about Linux and OSS.