Formation
With the rise of Linux during the 1990s, Linux distributions proliferated. Since the Linux kernel and GNU were both free software, anyone could put together and market a distribution. Many industry observers feared fragmentation and wide-ranging incompatibility, similar to the UNIX wars of the early 1990s.
The first moves towards the United Linux project were made at COMDEX in November 1999. There were a number of false starts, but the participants consistently agreed that a unified Linux platform for business made sense. The key factors for success were identified early in 2000.
Starting in March and April 2002, the United Linux board put together a base technical specification, getting input from the four consortium members and their business partners and vendors.
UnitedLinux, LLC was formed May 29, 2002 and the project was announced to the world on May 30, 2002. Two legal agreements were signed by the founding members at this time, the Master Transaction Agreement (MTA) and the Joint Development Contract (JDC); the JDC was also signed by UnitedLinux, LLC. These contracts provided, in part, that intellectual property related to UnitedLinux Software (with certain exceptions) would be assigned to UnitedLinux, LLC. Further, "ach member shall have a broad, royalty-free license to all intellectual property rights in the UnitedLinux Software, entitling each member to "use, copy, modify, distribute, market, advertise, sell, offer for sale, sublicense ... in any manner the Software, including the rights to make derivative works of the Software, to provide access to the Source Code and/or Object Code to any third party, to incorporate the Software into other products or bundle the Software with other products for its own business purposes and any other unlimited right of exploitation"; existing open source licenses, such as the GNU General Public License, also continued to apply. Disputes were to be settled via International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) arbitration.
A first beta was released to United Linux member partners on August 14, 2002, a public beta was released on September 25, 2002 and United Linux 1.0 was released on November 19, 2002.
For a detailed case study in what led one of the four partners to embrace the ideals of United Linux see Caldera OpenLinux.
Read more about this topic: United Linux
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