Latest Linux Standards Base Gets Vendor Support

Neopallium writes to tell us that in a recent announcement at the Desktop Linux Summit the Free Standards Group reports fourteen of the leading Linux vendors have pledged support for the newest release of the Linux Standards Base. From the article: "'The Release of LSB 3.1 is another milestone achieved by the industry and the Open Source Community that delivers ever increasing value to customers,' said Reza Rooholamini, director of enterprise solutions engineering at Dell. 'It enables further uniformity and standardization across applications and distributions that allows quicker deployment of Linux solutions with higher levels of quality.'"

Comments

Never mind the Linux vendors

[overshoot]

I want to know when we'll get LSB support from the application vendors.

No matter what the roadmap from the EDA Consortium says, too freaking many of the tools I use at $WORK refuse to run on anything other than Red Hat 7.2 (I kid you not!)

And, yes, they actually check /etc/redhat-release

Re:Never mind the Linux vendors

[spun]

Yeah, I've seen the same thing. This is the whole purpose of the LSB. If application developers won't support it, the whole project is pointless.

Is LSB a good thing?

[tenchiken]

As we watch competition help the Linux landscape considerably, is LSB a good thing? Gnome and KDE push each other to become better, Java and Mono compete for developers and even Rails and J2EE go after the web market.

Here is a standard that specifes how to package APIs and which APIs to use if you want to have a a LSB complient desktop and application. Isn't that a bit restrictive?

Re:Is LSB a good thing?

[GlassHeart]

If you find a standard too restrictive for your purposes, just don't follow it. You'll then see whether your additional non-standard features are worth more than incompatibility to the users. Netscape and IE are both good examples of products that ignored prevailing (and slow-moving) standards that gained user acceptance. On the other hand, there are any number of computer languages that will not survive because they're not C/C++/Java and whatever they do well wasn't worth enough to developers and users.

To see the downside of competing standards, just take a close look at the US cellular phone market. The rest of the world has standardized on the very imperfect GSM, and are communicating effectively while the US continues to figure out which one is the "best". The losers of that battle - if a victor standard is ever determined - stand to lose billions in network infrastructure and training, and all users have already been suffering lots of incompatibilities over the years on even the most basic features.

There is no "good" or "bad".

[khasim]

As we watch competition help the Linux landscape considerably, is LSB a good thing?

There is no "good" or "bad".

There are objectives that you would like to see achieved and there are avenues to achieve those objectives.

So the question becomes, what objectives will the LSB achieve and whether you believe those objectives should be achieved.

The LSB was, originally, an attempt to make it easier for ISV's to port their apps to a "standard" that would run on any Linux box that was LSB "compliant".

One problem was that one "compliant" box did not have the same libraries and such as another "compliant" box.

Another problem was that the various distributions had more financial incentive to push their own partnerships with ISV's rather than wait for the bugs to be worked out of the LSB. Which is why Red Hat and Oracle work so well together.

The third problem is that the LSB does not set a standard. It merely documents what some of the distributions are doing. In effect, they write down what the "de facto" standard was from 6 months ago and publish it 6 months from today.

Eventually (maybe), Linux (the kernel and all apps including desktops) will have matured sufficiently that there will not be such a difference in a year. Until then, the LSB isn't going to be much use.

Re:Dear ScuttleMonkey,

[mmd]

Dear Mr. Comma, your own commacentric biases may have blinded you to the fact that a semicolon is called for here:

You may remember me[;] I am [an] old friend.

Though the Comma family may be a fan of the Comma Splice, most consider it poor form.

LSB is lamelamelame.

[farrellj]

As long as the standard requires rpm files, its going to be a non-starter for many. The rpm format sucks the big one. I would much rather almost anything else than be stuck in RPM HELL. Give me slackpacks, apt-get, or even tarballs...but please save us from RPM Hell!

ttyl
          Farrell

p.s. I don't like rpm, can you guess?