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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."
This article is more about standards in Open Source development, specifically Linux
To me Open Standards are much more important than Open Source. Open Standards allow Open Source solutions to be created that are compatible with the other solutions.
Unix was killed by the high price of licenses. Unix during the early 1990's was supposed to be for the big boys --- the enterprise customers willing to pay up to 10,000 USD per seat for a Unix license.
With the license for Windows NT starting at less than 1000USD, the enterprises which formed the majority of the paying Unix customer base soon found a way to make do with NT and delete their Unix installations.
It wasn't open standards and the fragmentation that did Unix in, it was plain hubris among the Unix vendors who cannot fathom a future where a cheaper Windows NT would replace the robust, stable and widely admired Unix they are selling.
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.
When did this happen? I must have missed it.
Sure this leads to some incompatabilities and duplication of work but there are several ways for developers to mitigate this. Open standards are essential as they allow code be ported between distros rapidly. Another good idea is for devs to be involved (in some way) with using multiple distros. Different projects could work together more closely to achieve better interoperability.
Its an essential aspect of forking to accept that many forks are dead ends and should be allowed to die or merge back into the tree where desirable. There are many good projects out there and it isn't really in everyones interest to reinvent the wheel continuously.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
Similarly, Linux isn't displacing NT, it's displacing commercial UNIX.
The overlap of functionality between NT and Linux is, really, quite small. There aren't many cases for which Linux is a good solution, where NT could also be (and vice versa).
The thing I do not like about the LSB is that it seems to be pampering too much to the desires of the closed source application suppliers who only ship binaries not source. When the application is available in source form, many of the issued addressed by the LSB become either irrelevant or much less important. The binary distributions can build binaries for RPMs, debs etc for their own distribution and for the most part, users can install from source using the 'standard' "./configure; make; sudo make install" without having to worry about having the exact layout and library versions mandated by the LSB.
The funny thing about the LSB is that it concerns APIs for use by userland programs -it has _absolutlely nothing_ to do with the kernel. All of the requirements for LSB compliance concern calling conventions, executable formats, libc, POSIX facilities, filesystem layout an other extra-kernel configuration, most of which any UNIXoid system could support.
There are no obstacles to Darwin, *BSD and Solaris systems meeting LSB compliance, because it has nothing to do with kernels and everything to do with the specific details of a UNIX userland environment.
Generally I don't get into 'Linux' vs 'GNU' discussions but the LSB is once case where I feel the name 'Linux' is used completely inappropriately.
I know this is a major complaint of mine.
I simply don't understand why this has never been addressed.
The Linux community is always talking about expanding and competing with the Windows world, but they shoot themselves in the foot on trivial details like this.
The response I often get when I ask why don't we change to something that makes more sense is, "if you want a product more like Windows, then use Windows. We don't want our product dumbed down."
However, just because a product is difficult to use does not make it inherently better. I enjoy the flexibility of Linux. I am very comfortable in a command prompt/shell. However, I find it flat-out silly that I truly have to hunt for a program.
The basic file structure of GNU/Linux needs a major overhaul. Furthermore, now that we have menu standards that both KDE and Gnome use, is it too much to ask that programs include themselves in the menu when you install them?
Basic inconsistencies like these frustrate people attempting to switch, and they go right back to Windows.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Linux is a kernel, not an OS, but in common parlance, Linux might as well refer to the OS.
As an OS Linux is horribly fragmented. That is why people flock to a popular distro like Ubuntu, regardless of whether or not it is the best distro.
Personally, I do believe that the community needs fewer distros. There should be three methods for installing, period. Something like apt-get, emerge and then installing from a downloaded RPM. You shouldn't see different binaries for different distros. A Linux app should be an Linux app, period.
If we had true standards, we'd have fewer distros. But how many methods and standards do we have for installing programs? For file structures? For menu structures?
In what I believe to be a perfect world, there would only be maybe 8 major distributions of Linux.
Home/Personal
Developer
Media Center
Server
For each of those 4, you get a focus on either GTK or QT apps. Regardless, the file structure, configuration files, menu structure, etc. would be the same for every distro.
And while this will NEVER happen, I think we need one major development kit, instead of GTK vs QT. When it comes to aesthetics, visual style and usability, I can certainly understand people wanting a choice between Gnome and KDE. But when I design an app, I should build it on one toolkit, and then it should work on both Gnome and KDE, letting Gnome/KDE handle how it looks, etc. As it stands now, the dependency chains are ridiculous. If I use KDE but want a few GTK apps like Firefox or GAIM, I have to install half of Gnome.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
You sounded like a pretty technical person until you came out with this "snobbish" comment which, to me, makes absoultely no sense whatsoever.
I'm in a similar situation to you except that I use Linux about 80% of the time and keep a Windows XP machine for a little desktop stuff and for gaming. But I have no qualms about putting XP on my network because I keep it updated and don't use Outlook for email on it - likewise, I virus/spyware check it regularly and don't go to those sorts of places on the Internet where I might download a trojan. As a result, the XP box is secure enough for what I need it for and, to my knowledge, has never had a virus on it.
Sure, as a predominantly Linux user with a lot of UNIX/Linux expertise under my belt, I prefer Linux and my computing time on Linux writing scripts, compiling software and generally tweaking & learning is far more productive than on my Windows machine where I spend so much time running virus checkers and installing upgrades. But I don't view the XP machine as being a "threat" to my Linux ones, it's a "necessary evil" to me, nothing more.
I just find it strange that because I read on Slashdot constantly about how secure the BSD Unixes are (I've no reason to doubt those statements either), you would consider a Windows 2000 machine as a threat to a network of them....
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
But ideas are easy to come by, and even easier to spew out into a Slashdot post. The devil is in writing the code and getting the standards adopted.
Actually I switched every box in my house to Linux. My boxes were all Gentoo, and Suse for my wife.
She was incredibly pissed at Windows and wanted to increase her geek cred (which is substantial). However, she is back to Win x64. She is pretty smart. But she'd download an RPM, try to install it, then have no clue where the program was because it didn't create an entry in the menu, and she'd have no clue where the program directory was.
Are you telling me that isn't something that would annoy something attempting to switch? Because I can tell you from experience, that alone drove her back to Windows. And it is something so inane, that I can't believe it hasn't been addressed.
With Windows you get what Microsoft serves up to you. When the Linux community decides to make their own OS, you'd think with all the brilliant contributers (and they do exist) I don't understand why consistency and usability fall so far behind.
I'm not asking for anything to be dumbed down. And there is no need to copy Windows on everything. If Linux wasn't different, what would be the point of using it. However, if in a specific instance the Windows method is better, shouldn't it then be preferable? Why must it inherently be bad simply because Windows utilizes it?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Wrong. Nobody switching to Linux gives a shit what directory their KDE is installed in. Believe it or not most people have more important criteria that they demand from their computers, and are much more likely to switch back to Windows if they are required to look in their KDE directory in the first place.
Exactly! You seem to have missed the point poster was getting at. It may well be necessary to look in the KDE, and other, directories to simply get KDE to install on a given system, because the files get put in different directories on those systems, which is not where the automagical installer puts them.
The point of a uniform directory structure isn't so that a user can find things, it's so that a user never even has to know those things exist just to have a running system.
KFG
If you're going to say it's GNU/Linux because of the wonderful userland (and not because of glibc) then perhaps you should call it Bell-Labs/GNU/Linux
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
NT did not broadcast its serial number. You could buy a single copy of NT and install it a thousand times. If you needed a new file server or a temporary file server, it was so much easier to setup another NT box.Yes you do. But they're still in the organizations that had them before.
What has changed is that Windows servers swept through the smaller companies. Those companies never had a *nix box. They might have had LANtastic or NetWare or nothing, but they did not have *nix.Okay, I can agree with you on that.I guess that depends upon what business segment you're talking about.
Linux has been showing double digit growth for the past 5 years (maybe longer). Businesses are deploying it. At the server level.Now you're talking about the desktop segment.
The corporate desktop segment is different than the corporate server segment.
And the biggest problem with the corporate desktop segment is all the Access databases that have been built over the years.
The 2nd problem is all the not-supported-or-sold-anymore Windows apps that users "absolutely must have to do my job" that they've acquired over the years.
Changing 10 servers is easier than changing 10 workstations for users who've spent 10 years with the company.You might want to take a look at Google before you talk about "hobbyist market".I'll have to disagree with you on that.
While that would be nice, it is far more likely that one distribution will become dominant and that distribution's structure will become the de facto "standard".
And it seems we're already on that path with Red Hat and Ubuntu.
is that you can sound like you are saying something even when you say nothing. The parent comment could be applied to almost any article. Each statement in the comment may be true, but without even an anology between the truisms in the comment and the story what good does a comment like this do? Do you see a solution that is needlessly complex, or something that is only a complex as needed by the problem?
Think global, act loco
There was an arrogant attitude toward PC hardware in the mainframe and workstation market. If you wanted to do real computing, you wouldn't use a PC -- those were just toys! Drop 15 grand on our workstation and then we'll talk. Well PC's WERE toys for a few years, but you had to have blinders on to see that they weren't going to make progress. That arrogant attitude persisted while the 386 and then the 486 came out, while all the while Windows NT and to a smaller extent OS/2 started stealing more and more business from the traditional UNIX vendors.
And while the UNIX vendors arrogantly believed they had a better product, not a single one of them ever made an effort to push the GUI portion of UNIX beyond CDE (Well... except NeXT and SCO, but SCO's offering was a step back from CDE.) Gnome, KDE and Enlightenment were all efforts of the Open Source community and to my knowledge Sun's really the only one of the old guard to even consider using one of them. Hell, even Afterstep is a step up from the commercial vendors' offerings.
In the end it was cheap Intel hardware and cheap Intel operating systems that did the old guard in. Windows on a pentium made a server that worked well enough that it was impossible to justify the price jump of an order of magnititude to get just a little bit more. And I doubt there are more than a handlful of companies that would even consider putting UNIX on an employee's desk. Had the old guard of UNIX vendors played their cards right and embraced PCs as a natural extension of their high-end UNIX systems, things might have gone differently.
The current situation is rather interesting. The cost of Windows licenses is significantly more than the cost of Linux licenses. Microsoft can't really compete with free, so they have to find other avenues of attack. That, more than fragmentation, is the biggest danger to Linux. Most commercial companies only deal with RedHat or SUSE anyway. I don't know what the future will bring, but we most definitely live in interesting times.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
This post and the dozens below it are arguing the difference between Linux the open source kernel project and Linux the brand.
When most normal non-dev people talk about Linux they aren't talking about a kernel, seperate from the development projects which rely on it; they are talking about Linux the operating system alternative. Linux is actually a really good brand and those of you who try to box it into just the kernel are missing the point of this and many other articles like it.
If we think of Linux as simply a base part of the larger GNU community, then the Linux brand that means an alternate OS to Windows for the large majority of PC users will fail because of increased costs to commercial developers because each 'flavor' of Linux has such a small userbase.
While I'm not an expert by any means about the various standards projects, we need the community to be open to the idea of them if Linux the brand is to be realized.