The first release of UnitedLinux will reportedly be available in November 2002 at a cost of less than US$1,000. This cost will include upgrades and maintenance.

The software will be available from the four companies involved in the UnitedLinux project: Conectiva, the SCO Group (formerly Caldera), Suse, and Turbolinux.

The software is a collaborative project. The four companies combined their development teams to create a common Linux distribution (see http://Advisor.com/Article/COLEC173).

All Linux distributions come from a common code base, or kernel. However, vendors customize and add to the software for their own distributions, which has lead to interoperability problems in the Linux market. Developers, for example, have had to certify their applications for different distributions.

With UnitedLinux, the companies hope to provide a standardized, business-grade version of the open source operating system to provide a viable alternative to Red Hat Linux, which dominates much of the Linux market. (Pricing for Red Hat's business-grade product, Advanced Server, starts at $800 per server.) Developers will be able to certify their offerings to the UnitedLinux standard and be sure their software works on all compliant distributions.

The software will comply with the LSB and Li18nux standards, the companies say. (LSB is a separate effort to ensure application interoperability among compliant Linux distributions, and Li18nux provides a base for language globalization of compliant distributions and applications -- see http://Advisor.com/Article/SMITT580.) It will be available in English, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, French, and Hungarian.

A closed beta release of UnitedLinux has been available to partners of the four companies since August 2002. A public beta should be available from the http://www.unitedlinux.com Web site by the end of September.