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Squaring the Open Source/Open Standards Circle
Andy Updegrove writes "Before there was Linux, before there was open source, there was of course (and still is) an operating system called Unix that was robust, stable and widely admired. It was also available under license to anyone that wanted to use it, and partly for that reason many variants grew up and lost interoperability - and the Unix wars began. Those wars helped Microsoft displace Unix with Windows NT, which steadily gained market share until Linux, a Unix clone, in turn began to supplant NT. Unfortunately, one of the very things that makes Linux powerful also makes it vulnerable to the same type of fragmentation that helped to doom Unix - the open source licenses under which Linux distributions are created and made available. Happily, there is a remedy to avoid the end that befell Unix, and that remedy is open standards - specifically, the Linux Standards Base (LSB). The LSB is now an ISO/IEC standard, and was created by the Free Standards Group. In a recent interview, the FSG's Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, and CTO, Ian Murdock, creator of Debian GNU/Linux, tell how the FSG works collaboratively with the open source community to support the continued progress of Linux and other key open source software, and ensure that end users do not suffer the same type of lock in that traps licensees of proprietary software products."
All mainstream package formats have the full installation path hard-coded in the archive. LSB does not address this yet. The other problem of RPM, namely binary compatibility between different library versions, is already solved by compiling with apbuild. This works surprisingly easy, and allows my to provide one single package that can be installed everywhere [1].
[1] I can recommend to compile packages at Slackware because Slackware ships most packages without patches. Compiling an app at SuSE for example, made binaries depend on ABI changes caused by SuSE patches.
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
You were probably too busy boosting your ego via anti-Linux trolls to notice
While that might have been true, there was a standards brawl called the "UNIX Wars" right before Windows NT showed up. So clearly some people were frustrated with the state of standardization in the Unix world.
UNIX vendors also basically stopped workstation development (X11, Motif, CDE etc) in the early 90s when NT showed up, giving up the desktop without much of a fight.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
What's this about "various types of licenses" under which Linux is supposed to be available? Linux is GPL, so forking is possible, but there is no risk of UNIX-style fragmentation because the source is open and copyleft. For somebody to create a "closed Linux" they would have to start from scratch. You can't add closed bits to GPL software and keep them hidden, so any incompatible Linuxes ("fragments") could always be re-connected by users irritated about the differences.
The nonsense about UNIX displaced by NT and NT in turn displaced by Linux already set off my alarm, but the above really is FUD designed to further somebody's personal agenda.
It is not possible for UNIX-style fragmentation to happen to Linux, because of the GPL.
I thought forking and merging (thanks to the license) are strengths of Linux. It's an evolutionary development process where the best or most popular ideas rise to the top. Basic standards arise out of the most widespread/adopted projects.
It's hard for me to see in this chaotic (but necessary) environment how much external control developers are willing to have "imposed" on them by such standards - unless of course from a development/technical standoint it makes sense.
My understanding is that Linux really isn't in the game of competing with anybody (Unix, Windows or otherwise) anyway. it's just about the code, love of things computers and a new way of doing things.
E.
Linux has one thing Unix never did - if someone forks it and does something innovative, then ther forks/branches can use it too, thanks to the GPL. The varous 'Unix' flavors didn't allow that.