UserLinux

» see userlinux.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

UserLinux is on this site for an unusual reason. Almost everything buried here died after being used by somebody. UserLinux never produced an operating system at all, and it still managed to have a community and an obituary in the trade press, which makes it a fair record of how much of a Linux distribution is not the software.

Bruce Perens started it in late 2003, and the pitch was specific and good. Businesses would get a high quality operating system for free, built on Debian, sold alongside certifications and support contracts from companies that wanted that work. Red Hat had just moved its enterprise product behind a subscription, so the timing looked ideal for someone offering the same reliability without the invoice for the bits.

The plan depended on Debian. UserLinux was described afterwards as a repackaging effort with a support network built around it, which means the release schedule belonged to somebody else, and that somebody else was the Debian stable release process. Sarge was the target. Sarge took until June 2005.

~ the record ~

~ anyone still alive ~

The UserLinux mailing list went quiet for more than thirty days in the summer of 2005. On 3 September somebody started a thread with the subject "Anyone still alive", which is the least ambiguous signal a project can send, and LWN picked the story up four days later under the headline "Whither UserLinux?".

Perens answered honestly, and the answer was money. The customer who was going to pay him to work on it had evaporated, he wrote, and some time after that he had started running out of money to support the project himself. Everything had been waiting on one unpaid person.

~ what ubuntu did instead ~

LWN published "UserLinux: Autopsy" on 14 September 2005, and its diagnosis is worth quoting in substance. Ubuntu had delivered the same thing UserLinux described: a free Debian-derived distribution with long support periods and commercial support available. The method was the difference. Canonical did not wait for a Debian stable release, it forked from unstable on its own schedule, and it put serious money into making the result usable by people who were not already Debian developers.

Perens went on record about this repeatedly afterwards, including on Slashdot in 2006, and never claimed he had been robbed. The design was right and somebody else executed it while UserLinux was waiting for an upstream freeze to end.

~ what is left of it ~

userlinux.org and userlinux.com are both dead now. What the Internet Archive still has is the wiki that ran at userlinux.com through 2004 and 2005, including its pages of logo drafts, and the logo that won: the word USERLINUX in heavy italics behind a paper airplane drawn in outline, trademark symbol attached.

It is a good mark. A designer did real work on it, the community argued about portability and revisions on a wiki page, and it was applied to a distribution that was never built. That logo is the most finished artifact this project ever shipped.

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