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Why Aren't More Distros Becoming LSB Certified?
mydoghasworms asks: "I have done much thinking lately about Linux Standards Base. The idea makes lots of sense: Adopt a standard which will ensure that if some piece of software is compiled on one LSB-compliant system, it will run on any other LSB-compliant system.
This would be great for members of the general public who are looking for an alternative to Windows, don't want to pay for Mac, but are looking for a platform where installing and running software is as easy as on the platform they are used to. Seen in that light, if LSB lives up to its promise, it could be the step in Linux's evolution that could see it adopted by the general public. That leaves the question: Why is LSB not seeing greater adoption?"
"Is it because it is not marketed well enough? Is the certification process too difficult? Are there perhaps technical challenges to LSB certification not often discussed? If people agree that LSB is in fact what Linux needs right now to ensure widespread adoption, what should be done to create awareness of LSB? Should communities developing Open Source/Free Software projects be encouraged to provide LSB binaries? Your input would be most welcome here."
I see Linux as a kernel, not the OS there is a Popular Linux based OS like GNU-Linux which has many distributions. But all based on the same design. With the Linux kernel you are able to make your own Linux Based OS that is not like GNU-Linux and works more like Windows or BEos or Mac OS. TiVo is a good example. It is a OS but I wouldn't call it GNU-Linux it is its own OS based on the Linux Kernel to handle all the grunt work of the kernel but how files are handled and interfaced is completely different. If you are forced to follow standards the amount of innovation you are allowed is cut back. Linux is great but there is still room for improvement and being forced to follow standards may force a person to work inside a box they may not necessarily want to be in. It is like saying the TiVo should use X11 as its method to display, not its own ones although theirs are optimized for the job of video playback. Why should working with Red Hat and Suse be so similar why can't they be different OSs with the same kernel. As for adoption if a person who doesn't like Red Hat the chances are they are not going to like Suse because they are so similar. Perhaps they need an OS that fits their way of thinking. Linux will be far better adopted when it is no longer though of as Linux but as what ever OS it is controlled (powered by Linux)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Certification costs money. To have credibility it must be peer reviewed, or reviewed/audited/approved by an external body. Then there's the QA and testing process. And this activity is not a one time activity, but a long term commitment to regression testing "every patch".
Given that many linux distros are pretending to be enterprise-ready w/o enterprise sales or revenue would indicate that they are unable, uncapable, or unwilling to be certified. Basically they can't afford it.
Of course I am speaking in general terms about linux distributions and the industry in general, there are numerous examples which can be used to refute my generalisations. However I think there's ALOT of consolidation required in the Linux world yet to achieve some of the more lofty goals of open source.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I was once playing UT04, and all of a sudden the hard-drive went crazy, the frame-rate dropped and I rolled my eyes - obviously Linux was misbehaving again. It subsided after a minute or so (I kept on kicking ass the whole time, by the way, as I am hardcore :)) and a while later I quit. I then had a brainwave, and checked through the "Office" section of the K-menu - sure enough, OO.o was there. Turns out, I'd done an urpmi openoffice a while before playing UT, left it downloading, forgot about it completely, and the hard-drive thrashing while I played was the download completing and the installation taking place. I'd installed an entire fucking Office Suite without even lifting a finger. Cool stuff :)
Of course, if you want something that is not in your repository, then prepare for the worst pain ever or go without. It would be nice if some measure existed to ease the burden on packagers, as it seems that keeping them up to date is a tedious and thankless task.
I'm sorry, it really doesn't. This was tried with UNIX. More than once. The commercial interests of market differentiation always won out over the need for standardization. I cannot see why it would be any different for linux. In the commercial sector, you've got Red Hat & Suse, followed by "the seven dwarves" (pick any 7). Don't confuse this with the demographic breakdown you'll get here on /.
Red Hat & Suse have enough of a lead, that all they get by agreeing to LSB is to create a more level playing field for the dwarves. The dwarves may join, but in the absence of one of the major players also joining, this in and of istelf will not be sufficient to push the dwarves into widespread commercial acceptance.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
It's a pain in the ass to get simple brain-dead stuff like printing and mounting drives working in Windows, too.
For printing, my home desktop needs new (and uncertified) drivers from Brother. My brother's computer can't share the printer hooked up to my sister's computer and I've spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why. All the sharing _seems_ to be set up correctly, it just doesn't share.
And at work, I had to write up a document showing how to remap drives when my coworkers plug in removable drives to their systems. Windows kept on assigning drive letters that were already in use. Why on earth do we still use drive letters, anyway?
NONE of these things are things I would expect average users to be able to do. Linux certainly has plenty of problems, but so does Windows.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Why does nobody care about Linux Standard Base?
1) A standard has been arrived at already already- it is known as POSIX (http://www.knosof.co.uk/posix.html)
2) Linux Standard Base is yet another self appointed 'governing body' comprised of corporate 'industry leaders'. In other words, LSB hsa nothing to do with those who have made linux great, and therefore their 'ideas' will continue to be met with indifference.
You're absolutely correct. UNIX vendors tried this a long time ago and failed. The problem became you had multiple UNIX vendors accomplishing the same thing multiple different ways with no standards between them. This, of course, was one of the major downfalls of UNIX, and in part why it failed and how NT and Windows prevailed.
The Linux server world and ESPECIALLY the desktop world are falling into the same trap. Multiple vendors solving the same problem different ways. It is becoming more and more obvious that standardization is next big test of Linux. Linux will NEVER grow out of it's niche if vendors and developers don't start participating in standards.
Dude. I know it's probably nit-picking, but you really should cite someone you're quoting, and save the plagarizing of yourself for when you're alone and in private. ;)
by esconsult1 (203878) on Wednesday April 20, @01:07PM
I know this is a rant, but my shop recently switched back to Windows from Linux desktops (about 40 people), why? Because the new CEO (and me too), were sick and tired of people trying to get things to work together properly. We were sick of not having an Exchange replacement (don't get me started on the open source ones now "available"). And new hires and our clients were just plain used to using the dominant containers out there (windows/mac).
by esconsult1 (203878) * on Wednesday April 20, @07:23AM
I know this is a rant, but my shop recently switched back to Windows from Linux desktops (about 40 people), why? Because the new CEO (and me too), were sick and tired of people trying to get things to work together properly. We were sick of not having an Exchange replacement (don't get me started on the open source once now "available"). And new hires and our clients were just plain used to using the dominant containers out there (windows/mac).
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
I'm really disappointed with this discussion.
There are a couple of posts that get part of the answer to the question being asked and none of them has been moderated to higher than a 3 (and that one was somewhat off topic).
A few years back, I tried to do something similar to what a part of what LSB attempts to do, and it was like pulling teeth to get anyone to even talk about it. The initive was called FABIO, for "Free Application Binary Interface Objective". The intent was to get all the x86 Linux and BSD distributions to sync up with a single ABI, hopefully derived from a commercial ABI - the front-runner at the time, by far, was Solaris.
Nobody would do it, and it's for the same reasons that FABIO was stillborn, and the LSB is significantly more far-reaching than FABIO ever was:
1) Loss of editorial control
This is a big one for some projects. What if the LSB suddenly includes a library with a license that Debian can't live with, for example? What if I'm building an enterprise version of Linux, and I don't *want* to include graphics drivers that are part of the LSB 3.x specification? This is much less about what to put where as it is about what to include or not include in a distribution, and the acceptable per-distribution licensing policies and practices. The LSB throws in the kitchen sink.
2) Commoditization
If everyone conforms to a standard, what differentiates one product from another? This was touched on in that other posting. So far, no one has used the phrase "UNIX Wars", so I will. The UNIX Wars were about product differentiation. The other posting suggested that this was a result of market forces toward stratification, where different products rise up to meet different sets of needs. This is incorrect. FABIO only intended to standardize ABI - far less than the ambitious LSB. Further, it wanted to pick an existing commercial UNIX to standardize against, and finally, it wanted to define two levels of compliance. In the lowest level, you would be guaranteed that the standardized APIs were present. In the highest leve, you were able to turn off all APIs which were not standard: a guarantee that you could write code without unwittingly using a vendor extension, making the resulting binary non-portable. A mass exodus of developers to level 1 compliant platforms (to obtain the largest possible market) was expected... *if* FABIO made it. Neither the Linux nor the BSD camps bought into the idea: it would have rendered them commodities, differentiated only by philosophy and license. This is the same thing that drove the UNIX Wars: "I can't/won't compete against Microsoft, so I'll drive this other UNIX vendor out of business and take his market instead".
3) It's too big to be meaningful in any real sense
The LSB is too big to implement everything, and if you don't implement everything, you aren't LSB compliant. Face it, it's a superset of POSIX, and there's not one Linux yet that can claim full POSIX conformance for their system, let alone add in the other parts of the specification to get to LSB conformance. It's too damn big, and you can't turn off those things that are optional (you can barely do this with POSIX, using unistd.h, and if you do that with too many things, your system is useless anyway:. There's no agreed upon mandatory subset that lets you turn off the non-mandatory parts, and not get them at all, and know that all other mandatory compliance is there. POSIX has this problem in spades; the unistd.h mechanism is really poor at letting you pick interfaces to *NOT* be there: you can't. You also can't know, without a lot of research, what things are mandatory for conformance with standards built on top of POSIX - this is left as an exercise for the developer, who can say "if this interface is there, use it", but can't go anywhere and ask "what interfaces can I safely use, always, as long as a platform is conformant with standard XXX?". The LSB does a worse job: it includes POSIX, and then adds things on top of
All an LSB-compliant OS needs to do is to make a way to install these foreign, third-party application packages. Debian uses the software "alien" for this, for instance.
You're missing the point. Think about your experiences in corporate America thus far.
Imagine that you work in development for Vendor X producing Vendor X Linux. You have a marketing department and some managers over you, all hungry for targets and bonuses.
As a developer, you have spent the last three months bringing the product in line with LSB for the alpha test. Now, as you detail your changes in a meeting, both marketing and management jump on you:
"Wait, you mean our Vendor X Linux is now the same as Vendor Y Linux and Vendor Z Linux?"
"NO!" You answer, almost in a huff. "It just shares a fundamental compatibility with them. A common set of file locations, libraries, etc., so that customers know that what runs on Vendor X Linux will also run on Y Linux and Z Linux."
"So what you're saying," the manager responds, "Is that you're doing your best to lower barriers to out-migration among our existing customer base, while at the same time creating just the sort of backward-compatibility headache that is most likely to encourage it?"
"Plus," the marketing person adds, "you're diluting the brand! We have a strong brand and are proud of the value adds that our differences from other distributions represent. If we're LSB and Y is LSB and Z is LSB, we're really saying to the customer that we're the same as they are. We don't want to be the same. We want to be better. We have a strong brand and we shouldn't be afraid to use it! We want to be the standard; we want to make sure that Y and Z match us. We certainly don't want to go around saying that we're doing our best to match them."
Next thing you know, you're walking out of that meeting with instructions to roll back the changes you've just spent the last few months making, to ensure that the product is NOT LSB-ready.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW