[KLUG Members] Is UserLinux an alternative to Red Hat/Novell Enterprise Linux?

[Robert V. Kanaley]

I recently came across Open Source Initiative cofounder Bruce Perens’
proposal for a Debian based business-oriented distro to be called UserLinux,
http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl. In a white paper on that site
Bruce presents a pretty compelling case that the relationship between Red
Hat and Fedora developers is pretty one-sided. Bruce gives an example of how
it cost a major Red Hat supporter/developer big money just to use their own
contributed code in their own product! Bruce goes on to argue that the Red
Hat/Fedora and Novel/Suse economic models are not good models for an open
source business oriented distro, hence he proposes UserLinux.

I don’t know if UserLinux will garner the support that Bruce envisions, but
on paper UserLinux sounds like a great idea. On a more practical note, I
believe that in response to a posting asking for distro recommendations
other than Red Hat, Adam posted a rather disparaging comment about Debian. I
believed he mentioned slow patch releases in response to security problems.
I presume that UserLinux would be able to focus their resources on issues of
immediacy, once a stable UserLinux distro has been released.

Personally, I am thinking about setting up a UserLinux box to see if a lowly
sysadmin type can contribute anything to this fledgling project.

I would be interested to know what anyone else thinks about UserLinux and
the ideas behind it.

Responses probably belong on advocacy, but I leave it to the officers to
direct discussion as they see fit.

Regards,

Bob

Robert V. Kanaley
Manager Information Systems
Agdia, Inc.
rvk at agdia.com
http://www.agdia.com