Monday, August 15, 2005

On Tuesday, August 9, 2005, many of the major Debian-derivative GNU/Linux distros banded together to create the Debian Common Core Alliance. Essentially, the DCCA is a group of Debian heavy-weights who got tired of reinventing each others' efforts, and decided to implement the Linux Standards Base in a set of binary packages that will be common to their distros. The benefits are obvious. Applications designed to work on one distro will work on another. The Alliance members will save bunches of money on not duplicating each others' work. Customers of the DCCA members will have the option of getting support for DCC code from a broader array of vendors. And perhaps most importantly, it now becomes just that much harder for Steve Ballmer to whine about an absence of a "center of gravity" in GNU/Linux distros.

As former Debian lead Bruce Perens discusses in this article, Debian has long played a central role in helping people all over the world share the fun, frivolity, fascination, and occasional frustration that is the world of free Open Source software. Bruce has been present and intimately involved with much of this work as an author, advocate, and teacher of much of what it means for a project to be an "Open Source" project, so he is in a great position to give us penguinistas some insight as to what the new DCC initiative means for our favorite operating system, and the free Open Source applications that ride on it.

So what we're doing now is that we have gotten really all but one now of the leading Debian derivative distributions to gather to collaborate on having a common core which we will certify to the Linux Standard Base 3.0. Debian is very close to that standard now. We will have that core be distributed to application creators, so that they can make sure that their application works on the Debian Common Core, and then they will be able to say without doing any additional work that their application works on Linspire, Xandros, SUSE, Mepis, and a number of other derivative distributions that are named in our press kit. Currently, Ubuntu is not a member, but I believe that if you certify to this DCC platform, it should work on Ubuntu also.

I think it's very important for Linux and Open Source to go from the paradigm of a distribution with a single support vendor, which is really what we have now in the case of Novell and Red Hat, each having divergent distributions, and each being the main providers of support for those systems.