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."

Comments

Cpt. RMS to the rescue!

[c0l0]

The REALLY nifty thing about UNIX is the userland. Without it and its tremendously clever and somewhat unique approach to solving problems in the way it does, it's REALLY not just "Linux" you should be talking about when referring to a modern UNIX-reimplementation. It's GNU/Linux.

Re:Linux supplanting NT???

[linvir]

NT took the desktop without a fight. The Unix world collectively said "Here, take it all! Just don't hurt us!". The only place where NT "steadily gained market share until Linux, a Unix clone, in turn began to supplant NT", is in the server market, where according to 'my' article

In 1999, Linux scooted past Novell's Netware to become the No. 2 server operating system behind Microsoft's Windows NT. Over the next four years, IDC said, Linux shipments will grow at a rate of 28 percent,

So fuck you, troll. We're not just talking about desktop Linux today, so go back under your bridge and wait.

real reason was multiple processors

[m874t232]

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

That's a nice, often-repeated story, but it doesn't correspond to reality. In reality, UNIX variants were no worse than the different versions of Windows or MacOS we have had to live with. In fact, once the ABIs were decided upon, arguably, things were somewhat better. And today, at least on x86, the Linux ABI is a de-facto standard that's supported by several UNIX systems. For a brief time, Windows and MacOS had their act together a little bit better in terms of software packaging and installation (driven by necessit), but UNIX and Linux are now lightyears ahead of both Windows and OS X in that area, too.

The primary source of binary incompatibility between machines was, in the end, simply the use of different processors by different vendors; as long as that existed, software vendors had to recompile and ship different binaries anyway. Note that Microsoft briefly tried to handle multiple processors with Windows NT and the effort flopped completely.