Whither UserLinux? [LWN.net]

The UserLinux project was founded by Bruce Perens in 2003 with this mission:

Provide businesses with freely available, high quality Linux operating systems accompanied by certifications, service, and support options designed to encourage productivity and security while reducing overall costs.

More informally, Bruce was disappointed with the currently-available "enterprise" Linux offerings, which he sees as taking much of the freedom out of free software. His goal was to create a new distribution (based on Debian) which would be 100% free, aimed at the needs of smaller businesses, and supported by a wide network of independent companies. UserLinux would thus fill in the gap between the unsupported "development" distributions and the expensive, restrictive packages offered by Red Hat and Novell.

A small community coalesced around the idea and got busy with peripheral tasks: creating a web site (carrying the unfortunate tag line "Linux for Business" once used by Caldera), designing a logo, writing a trademark policy, and so on. But UserLinux never really got around to building a distribution. This was partly by design: UserLinux was intended to be a version of Debian Sarge with only minimal changes. A few metapackages would be put together, and the package mix as a whole would be greatly thinned down. But UserLinux never intended to create a new distribution; it was more of a repackaging effort with an attempt to build a support network around it.

The UserLinux experience carries a warning for future efforts: any business or development plan which has a step reading like this:

Wait for the next Debian stable release to come out.

is more than usually likely to encounter delays. UserLinux got to that step, and found itself waiting for the Sarge release. For a long time. This wait killed any momentum UserLinux may have had.

Nonetheless, the Debian Sarge release happened in June. Three months later, nothing has been heard from UserLinux. So, finally, an interested observer asked what was going on. Bruce responded that UserLinux was, indeed, still alive, but, unfortunately, everything was waiting on him personally.

Essentially, the customer who was going to pay me to work on this evaporated, and some time later I started running out of money to support the project. I subsequently took a job with Sourcelabs. I have 50% of my work time to work on whatever Open Source I choose (courtesy of Sourcelabs) but so far have been pulled in a lot of directions and thus not much has gotten done on UL of late.

Bruce may indeed succeed in getting others interested in doing some of the lifting to make UserLinux 1.0 a reality. But a distribution which can be stalled because one person gets busy is not going to be particularly appealing to businesses looking for an alternative to the current support offerings. UserLinux, in other words, appears to have little chance of achieving its initial goals, even if it does get a release out.

The slow release of Sarge is one thing which happened to UserLinux, but there is another unexpected event which came along as well: Ubuntu. In many ways, Ubuntu is what UserLinux intended to be: a 100% free, Debian-based distribution with relatively long support periods and available commercial support offerings. Ubuntu seems to have beat out UserLinux by virtue of not waiting for a stable Debian release, putting a great deal of attention into ease of use and making things "just work," and the small advantages that come from having a few tens of millions of dollars of seed money in the bank. As a result, Ubuntu has a real distribution, with a large and enthusiastic user community.

Not everybody is comfortable with Ubuntu, despite the fact that the company's models appear to have put their clothes back on. Bruce's message puts it this way:

I think the project continues to have value and I don't believe that basing on the work of any one company, even Ubuntu which may be more of a rich man's hobby project than a company, is the solution for support of Linux distributions.

The creation of the Ubuntu Foundation may help to ease the concerns about the distribution being controlled by a single company. Meanwhile, Ubuntu has been building a distributed support network along the lines of the one envisioned by UserLinux, and a certification scheme is in the works. The 6.04 release, due next year, will be supported for five years (for server use) - if the Ubuntu Foundation lasts that long.

In other words, it seems that the distribution UserLinux wanted to create has come to be - it just didn't happen quite the way they had intended. Anybody who wants to carry the UserLinux banner forward as a separate project should first be able to tell the world what they will do that existing distributors are not doing, and how they will turn UserLinux into a viable organization that businesses will trust. Without answers to those questions, UserLinux will remain a project with a nice logo, but with no software or users.

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Whither UserLinux?

Posted Sep 8, 2005 13:24 UTC (Thu) by TxtEdMacs (guest, #5983) [Link]

I concur heartily with your statements regarding Perens - too often he has been wrong when in a position of "power" (having leverage would be the more accurate statement) and long afterwards recants the damage he has done.

This year my son was really taken first with Debian (the distribution of choice now for me) and soon after for Ubuntu (which I will be testing too soon). I was skeptical about Ubuntu and its probable staying power, though I was never against its goals.

Recently my impression of Shuttleworth and his goals have changed towards the much more positive. Read for yourselves his interview in Linux Format (hard copy magazine published in the UK) the short version on line: http://linuxformat.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Ne...

If possible I would suggest reading their October issue pp 74-79 LXF issue 71 for the complete interview. Or better yet take an hour or so and listen and watch him in this video: http://linux.blogweb.de/uploads/02-Ubuntu_Talk-Mark_Shutt...

[Above links were found on comments section of LXer.com. This site is relatively new and is devoted to daily Linux news. It was created by Dave Whitinger formerly of Linux Today site.]

I am sorry to say my impression of Perens was never as high as it seemed to be on slashdot and other similar places, it has since slumped continuously with his attitude only he can do it well and those that succeed where he failed released a flawed product. Shuttleworth is not the rich, self-centered dilettante that was my first impression nor as Perens seems to snidely imply.

Whither UserLinux?

Posted Sep 9, 2005 18:23 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Bruce will little-doubt be reading these
comments, as he's a LWN
subscriber and does post his own comments...

>> Ubuntu... more of a rich man's hobby than a company.

Yes... that immediately rubbed me the wrong way as well. I'm personally
quite happy as a Gentoo user and thus have no personal iron in the
Shuttleworth/Ubuntu fire, and am mainly interested in Debian due to its
influence on particularly the freedom side of the debate, so I'm as much
of an uninterested third party in Ubuntu as could be had in the community.

Still, the above /really/ grated the wrong way. What's the entire open
source community, to the proprietary business community, but "more of a
hobby for a few men than successful company"? True, there are a lot of
individuals that now happen to get paid for the contributions they make,
but the fact is, most of them were doing it as a hobby long before they
began doing it for pay, and most would /still/ be doing it as a hobby,
altho likely at a slower rate, if they /weren't/ getting paid to do
it. /That's/ /the/ /whole/ /point/, for many folks, they do it for
the /love/ of it, not for the money. Within such a community, what's so
wrong about a rich guy contributing some of his resources, money, in this
case, to the project as well? If that is to be dismissed as "not serious
enough to build a business upon", where is the line to be drawn, isn't
the /entire/ FLOSS community then "not serious enough to build a business
upon"?

What would our reaction be to someone like Bill Gates making such a
statement? Maybe Bruce is part of the community; maybe we are losing him;
maybe he has gotten too big a head and needs to apologize (and yes, I say
that last fully aware that he's likely to read this, yes, I /am/ that
disappointed in him, lately, not that my personal opinion matters,
but...).

Anyway... as the article pointed out, User Linux isn't in a position for
the prime mover behind it to be throwing stones, certainly not at Ubuntu
or the prime mover behind it. Which one looks to be the "rich man's
hobby" (rich being somewhat relative, but Bruce certainly isn't wondering
how he's going to buy his next meal or where he's going to be calling
home, next week, even if he doesn't have the funds of a Shuttleworth) and
which one looks to be the real project, with two concrete releases behind
it and another one on the way, "rich man's hobby" or not?

In a sense, if we have the time to debate this sort of thing, we are /all/
"rich men" (or rich women). As ES Raymond rightly points out, a gifting
society, an economy of respect based on what one has given to the
community, such as that of the FLOSS community, does not and cannot exist
until basic needs are met. I somehow doubt many of us would be here
debating such things, if we were literally fighting for our survival in
New Orleans. That we are even here, discussing this, indicates that by
the standards of many in the world, we are "rich". Thus, we are /all/
"rich men", tending our "hobby", in some form of the term. The community
is /made/ of such folks. Then Bruce comes along and implies that's
a /bad/ thing? Is he trying to insult us? Has he turned proprietary and
now is on the MS payroll? What's up? That certainly doesn't sound like
the sort of statement I'd /expect/ to come from a leader in the community!

As for User Linux... IMO, it'd be best to fold the effort back into
Ubuntu. Yes, there are all kinds of Linux distributions each with their
own emphasis, their own angle. However, the stated goals of User Linux
aren't compatible with being simply another minor niche distribution, and
I fail to see how it could now make the sort of contribution to the
community it originally intended. (Really, check my comments on the
original announcements here on LWN, and you'll see I always thought it
wasn't quite the right solution, but that's beside the point.) Given
that, IMO it's better to fold it into what's there and let the
participants devote their energies to something else. IMO, the only thing
keeping that from happening is community politics and people's egos, and
that's just not a good enough reason, IMO.

Duncan

Whither UserLinux?

Posted Sep 10, 2005 13:47 UTC (Sat) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

As for User Linux... IMO, it'd be best to fold the effort back into Ubuntu

What effort?! The logo? ;-)

Take a look at the UserLinux website: there is nothing of any interest there. It also appears to have a lot less to do with Free Software than Ubuntu. Now that is much more important to me than any disdain coming from Mr Perens. The latter is not surprising at all, but the former does worry me a bit, seeing that a lot of people apparantly keep swallowing Bruce's largely self-proclaimed Open Source guru status.