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How the LSB Keeps Linux One Big Happy Family
blackbearnh writes "The Linux Standard Base is the grand attempt to create a binary-level interface that application developers can use to create software which will run on any distribution of Linux. Theodore Tso, who helps maintain the LSB, talked recently with O'Reilly News about what the LSB does behind the scenes, how it benefits ISVs and end users, and what the greatest challenges left on the plate are. 'One of the most vexing problems has been on the desktop where the Open Source community has been developing new desktop libraries faster than we can standardize them. And also ISVs want to use those latest desktop libraries even though they may not be stable yet and in some ways that's sort of us being a victim of our own success. The LSB desktop has been getting better and better and despite all the jokes that for every year since I don't know probably five years ago, every year has been promoted as the year of the Linux desktop. The fact of the matter is the Linux desktop has been making gains very, very quickly but sometimes as a result of that some of the bleeding edge interfaces for the Linux desktop haven't been as stable as say the C library. And so it's been challenging for ISVs because they want to actually ship products that will work across a wide range of Linux distributions and this is one of the places where the Linux upstream sources haven't stabilized themselves.'"
It's for rpm based commercial distros. Debian doesn't fit, and the "alien" program doesn't work on everything. Since I use Debian on servers and Debian-derived on desktop, I don't care about the LSB, I care more about the standards of the Debian project.
"Yet none of this stops Oracle RAC from installing on
Debian or Ubuntu"
True. Yet no ammount of LSB stops Oracle to only certify this or that platform (like RHEL 4u2 or Ubuntu Strange Scarab, or SUSE 10 or whatever) instead of, say, LSB 2.0.
So, the LSB is mainly aimed at attracting privative software like Oracle to Linux (who else need guaranteed ABI compatibility when you can recompile?), no wonder so many distributions don't care so much (especially when the "middle ground" that it's the basis of the standard looks so much like "whatever is shipped on current RHEL"); but then, privative software vendors feel they need much more confidence in order to certify to a platform than a "of a kind" standard, so they are not strongly pushing for it either.
End result? Well, it's been -how many? six years? and LSB it's only known to a bunch of freaks.
No wonder, did I say that yet?
Phase 2) Bundle tons of free software with Linux packages
Phase 3) Become dominate OS.
God spoke to me.
I'd mod my own comment down, but I can't mod in a thread where I posted a comment.
God spoke to me.