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

Open Standard != standards in Open Source

[El_Muerte_TDS]

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.

It aint open standards that "killed" Unix

[yeOldeSkeptic]

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.

Re:It aint open standards that "killed" Unix

[IntlHarvester]

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.

Does it handle KDE/GNOME install paths already?

[vdboor]

The talk about the LSB is nice, but one of the major problems of Linux is the diverse locations where KDE and GNOME are installed. Some use /usr, others use /opt/kde3, or /opt/kde/3.x. Does the LSB already address this issue? These diverse paths are the main reason I can't deploy one RPM/DEB/TGZ package for all Linux distributions.

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.

Fear of fork.

[killjoe]

The article summary is a bit of a flamebait. In order for a product to fork there must be two forces in action.
1) Licensing that allows a fork.
2) Frustrated users who feel like they can't shape the future of the product via existing channels.

This is why there are at least three forks of java and none of perl. I suppose one could argue that the forks of Java are not true forks but attempts at re-engineering but the end result is the same.

Will linux fork like Unix? Well in a way it already has, there is real time kernel, different kernels for devices etc but not in the way the article talks about it. The article isn't talking about forks per se it's talking about distros. The author seems to have missed the point that the Unix forks were actual forks in the kernel not "just" distros.

Weird article really. Kind of pointless too.

Re:Fear of fork.

[Enderandrew]

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.

But who IS certified?

[wandm]

I'd like to support the nonfragmentation of Linux - as I guess many would. But looking at the LSB 3.0 certified list http://freestandards.org/en/Products, just shows Red Hat, SUSE and Asianux. Are these all the choices I have?

Could someone please explain me?

Splintering

[ronanbear]

Splintering is also something that helps Linux innovate so rapidly. If you have a good idea and are willing to do the work you can pick a distro that suits your needs. If there isn't one for you or the distro maintainers aren't receptive to your ideas you can fork a distro and experiment on your own.

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.

Karma Burning

[Big Sean O]

All your (Linux Standards) Base are belong to us.

NT didn't displace UNIX

[drsmithy]

It displaced Netware.

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).

LSB is a misleading, limiting and silly name

[munro]

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.

Re:Unix is dead

[ems2]

"Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." - Rob Pike 1991

It was a Number of Things

[Greyfox]

Fragmentation was never the biggest issue -- you tended to buy one vendor's UNIX for your shop anyway. For the most part a C program compiles cleanly between one UNIX and the next, though HP/UX 9 was a bit odd when it came to networking code. UNIX licenses weren't cheap back in the day and they didn't make UNIX run on cheap PC hardware. Back in '89 a base copy of SCO Xenix for the 286 ran about $1200 through Techdata. If you wanted a C compiler, X11, man pages, or TCP/IP networking you had to sprint for all those separately. You could get BSD, apparently, but there wasn't a lot of easily accessable information on installing it and it sounded like it'd be an exercise in arcane lore.

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.