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.
Two years after acquiring the company that developed the AppArmor security software for Linux, Novell has laid off team members behind the project, CNET News.com has learned.
AppArmor's founder and leader, Crispin Cowan, joined Novell in 2005 when it acquired his company, Immunix, which developed the software. But he and four others from the project lost their Novell jobs in Portland, Ore., on September 28, Cowan confirmed.
However, he plans to continue AppArmor development. He and two other laid-off AppArmor programmers, Steve Beattie and Dominic Reynolds, launched an AppArmor consulting company on Wednesday called Mercenary Linux.
"I have lots of reputation capital. I can get another job. But I care about AppArmor as a project and I want it succeed," Cowan said in an interview Thursday. However, the change was a surprise: "I'm stunned. I was getting bonuses and raises and awards up until the time I was laid off."
AppArmor, which Novell said will still be hosted on its Web site, is software that grants software only the privileges and access it needs, an approach that reduces the powers a remote attacker can get from a compromised computer. Although leading Linux seller Red Hat is backing an earlier rival technology called SELinux, Canonical is building AppArmor into its next version of Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbon, and Mandriva has included AppArmor in its new Mandriva Linux 2008.
Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry wouldn't comment on specifics of the layoff, but said job cuts are "part of our ongoing restructuring efforts we've been talking throughout the year." Part of that effort involves "improving our product development process."
Novell will continue updating AppArmor and using and it in its Suse Linux Enterprise Server software, but the development mechanism has changed since Novell released AppArmor as open-source software in 2006. Some companies outsource programming work to India, but with active open-source software projects, there's even lower-cost options.
"An open-source AppArmor community has developed. We'll continue to partner with this community," though the company will continue to develop aspects of AppArmor, Lowry said.
Cowan was concerned that resources need to be focused directly on the project.
"Novell wants the community to pick up maintenance and development of AppArmor. But tossing it in the wind and hoping is not good enough assurance for me, so now it's my business to go find sponsors who are willing to pay for AppArmor development," Cowan said.
Mercenary Linux will write security profiles for software, though that's not a difficult task, as well as translate the software to new hardware, help to embed it in particular devices, and, potentially, revamp it for use on different operating systems, Cowan said.
But chiefly he expects Mercenary Linux to get by on smaller projects. "It's much easier to sell a small chunk of AppArmor development to somebody who needs something specific than it is to sell the whole concept," he said. "If somebody loves us and one day wants to acquire Mercenary, that's great."
- prev
- 1
- next
