[CS-FSLUG] NI: DEBIAN CONSORTIUM TAKES ON NOVELL, RED HAT

[Fred A. Miller]

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

DEBIAN CONSORTIUM TAKES ON NOVELL, RED HAT


By Neil McAllister

Posted August 22, 4:00 a.m. Pacific Time

"A lot of people have been unhappy with the service they've been getting
from a certain very large Linux vendor." That was Bruce Perens ,
speaking at this year's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, which took place
in San Francisco earlier this month. You can fill in Bruce's blank
yourself. But if you think he came to the conference to stump for more
choice in Linux distributions, you're mistaken. In a sense, he was
calling for fewer choices.

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Perens, one of the founders of the open source movement, took the stage
at LinuxWorld in support of the DCC (Debian Common Core ) Alliance, a
consortium of Linux vendors pledged to build a common, standards-based
core for distributions based on Debian GNU/Linux.

Here's the situation: There are lots of niche Linux distributions out
there, such as Slackware and Gentoo, but within the enterprise, Linux
usually comes from one of three sources. Two are prominent open source
software vendors -- Novell and Red Hat. The third is Debian .

If Debian isn't the household name that Red Hat is (or that Suse is in
Europe), it's certainly well-known among developers. According to
Perens, many coders develop on Debian but deploy on Red Hat, because
although Debian is often lauded for its stability and sound design,
targeting it for applications can be tricky.

The Debian Project's strict open source principles preclude it from
bundling anything in an official Debian release that isn't offered under
a free-software license. Also, Debian is slow to upgrade its software
packages, sometimes waiting until long after the other distributions
have included the latest in-demand features. That's the price of
stability.

Doctrinally these are sound choices, but users sometimes see them as
shortcomings. That's why popular Debian-derived distributions, such as
Linspire, Mepis, and Xandros, start with a stock Debian release and
build from there, adding commercial applications and upgraded software
as they see fit. That's great for the specific niche each distribution
serves, but it also means that each one varies from its Debian core in
unique ways. It's impossible for developers to target all of the
Debian-derived Linux distributions as a single platform.

The DCC Alliance wants to change that by working with the Debian
community to align the related distributions around a common core. At
the heart of their plans is an effort to bring Debian into compliance
with the LSB (Linux Standard Base),  a standard that describes how the
internals of a Linux distribution should be organized.

If the Alliance is successful, it could unite the fragmented Debian
market and shore up Debian's position as the third pillar of a
tripartite universe of enterprise Linux. It could also give disgruntled
customers the confidence they need to walk away from those troublesome
support contracts with the other two big names.

But Perens was quick to point out that it's not a horserace, and that
Debian, Red Hat, and Suse are actually all working toward the same goal.
"There's no reason to work against each other," he said, adding, "I'd
rather work against Microsoft."

Indeed, if there was any downside to the presentation, it was the fact
that Ubuntu -- the Debian-based distribution founded by South African
dot-com billionaire Mark Shuttleworth that's proven wildly popular since
it launched in October 2004 -- had declined to participate. That led me
to wonder: Are we witnessing the beginnings of a new Debian standards
skirmish -- the DCC Alliance's formal standard versus Ubuntu's de facto
one?

Neil McAllister is a senior editor at InfoWorld.

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