| DCC Alliance: I'm not dead yet! |
Apr. 06, 2006
Rumors were swirling around the halls of LinuxWorld that the often-troubled DCC Alliance was going to fold its tents and disappear. What actually happened was that several of the members met quietly and agreed to a tenuous plan to move forward under a new president pro tem, Kevin Carmony, Linspire Inc.'s CEO.
The DCC Alliance was created last summer by several Debian Linux companies and organizations. These included credativ GmbH, Knoppix, LinEx, Linspire, MEPIS LLC, Progeny Linux Systems Inc., Sun Wah Linux Ltd., UserLinux, and Xandros Inc. Its purpose was to encourage ISVs (independent software vendors) and PC vendors to support the companies' Debian-based Linux distributions. To do this, the companies agreed to work on a common core Linux, based on Debian, that would be LSB (Linux Standard Base) compliant.
The Common Core would not be a distribution in and of itself. Instead, this collection of essential programs from Debian Linux, combined with member additions, would serve as the foundation for each group's own distribution.
The DCC Alliance quickly ran into trouble with members of the Debian community who disliked the group's use of the Debian name and that it was doing this outside of the Debian Project.
In addition, there was concern within the organization that the project was moving too slowly. The final straw for some was when the Alliance's founding father, Ian Murdock of Progeny, left the Alliance to take over the leadership of the LSB.
Several members felt that the DCC Alliance, like UnitedLinux before it, would not live up to its promise of creating a third-party, vendor-friendly Linux. Indeed, MEPIS, which had been a leading member of the DCC Alliance, began switching its distribution from the Common Core to the extremely popular Ubuntu distribution.
Carmony knows all this history and said that while nothing is official until all the members of the Alliance can get together and talk, he believes that the Alliance can still meet its goals if it focuses on them. In addition, "We're going to reach out once more to Mark [Shuttleworth] and Ubuntu. They're Debian, we're Debian. We want LSB compliance. They want LSB compliance. It really makes sense for us to be working together, and I think we can do that now."
Ubuntu thus far has resisted joining the DCC, but Carmony has a card to play in that Linspire and Ubuntu are already talking about a collaboration. Ubuntu is close to an agreement with Linspire to offer Linspire's CNR (Click-N-Run) application download service to Ubuntu users. That relationship could help get the most popular Linux distro into the DCC.
As part of that move, Carmony would also like to see MEPIS back in the DCC Alliance family.
While Carmony and the representatives from other DCC companies at LinuxWorld -- such as Progeny, Sun Wah, and Xandros -- are just starting to revitalize the DCC Alliance, they are hopeful that the renewed organization will bring new life to all the Debian Linuxes in the business market, as well as its long-time stronghold in the enthusiast and home user markets.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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