MandrakeSoft has released a statement detailing the reasons why Mandrake will not join United Linux. The two key reasons for the decision repeated through out the document consisted of UnitedLinux's non-Free nature and lack of any advantages for MandrakeSoft.
Both of these reasons are closely tied together according to the company, as part of Mandrake's market advantage is its openness. The company summed up this view with a question - “So, why would anyone choose Mandrake Linux if our product was the same as the others, plus had the added disadvantage of not being very 'open' any longer?”
In the statement, the company also noted that the Linux Standards Base (LSB) ought to be enough to allow proprietary software to easily run on all compliant distributions. Comparing Linux to the auto industry, the statement noted that it is not necessary to have just one unified car model for all the cars to work on the same roads.
This is, no doubt, another bad PR blow to the UnitedLinux initiative, which has received lots of negative press since its launch. With a mixture of concern about the proprietary base, and plain confusion about its advantages, UnitedLinux's announcement has not been a success by most measures.
In a written statement last month, Richard M. Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, bashed UnitedLinux comparing its disadvantages to that of Windows. Stallman explained a bit more in an interview here a few weeks ago. Independently, the Free Software Foundation issued a similar statement questioning the UnitedLinux group.
While it is hard to say how UnitedLinux's future success will play out, with it placed directly opposite RedHat and Mandrake, it has quite a hill to climb. You can find the whole statement from MandrakeSoft at their investor web site.