Insided UnitedLinux (developerWorks)

Posted Nov 21, 2002 1:10 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

One thing I see missing in articles written by "United Linux"
advocates (large companies) is a mention of the GNU GPL or free
software. Without the GPL, "United Linux" is just Microsoft Windows
with a 10% speed increase and a little more stability.

I can imagine the United Linux based distros competing based on how
much software that is available for windows they can package for their
disros.

GNU/Linux, and it's applications, is great because anyone can fork the
code of any project if they don't think the current developers are
doing the best possible job. Another good thing is that programmers
can learn to write good software by reading real source code.
Upgrades cannot be forced on people because anyone can add support for
old and new file formats to an application. When the community doesn't
have access to the source code for an application bugs will go unfixed
until the software owner decides to fix them.

Maybe I'm too cynical. These big companies stand to increase sales
greatly if they can get GNU/Linux users to use their non-free
software. They have a lot of money for marketing too. "United Linux"
isn't a contribution to the community (or society in general), I'd be
much happier if they used their money to hire developers to help out
with development of existing applications such as MySQL, GNOME Office,
DotGNU & mono, ClassPath (free Java implementation), GNU Enterprise,
Wine, etc.

Ciaran O'Riordan