Great Linuxworld article on the LSB and Red Hat

Marc Merlin writes "After Red Hat has been called the next microsoft by several, and after some people saying that Red Hat has not reason to follow the LSB (Linux Standards Base), this Linuxworld article should hopefully give a better view of the situation, and it also gives a nice history of the LSB "

Comments

Not Fair

[Bruce Perens]

When an article mentions me unfavorably several times, it would be responsible of the reporter to contact me and ask me for my side. I was in Iceland last week, and managed to log in daily and answer several reporter's emails, but I didn't get any questions about this one.

The LSB was meant to be a binary collaboration between all of the distributions, not a standard distribution from Bruce Perens. There's no reason for Caldera and Red Hat to work individually on "sysvinit" when they can do so together - the package doesn't distinguish their distributions from each other, and they could use the time they saved to work on things that do distinguish their distributions.

I tried to get Red Hat on board. They opted not to sign on.

When it became clear I didn't have a consensus, I got out of the way. I've been careful to avoid criticizing LSB since then, as that would do no good for Linux.

Bruce Perens

What about a handheld standard??

[Cptn Proton]

It seems to me that it would be smart to work on a subset of the LSB in paralell to the full-scale Linux. Sort of a 'Linux CE'.

As mobile and space constrained applications become more prevalent it seems that it would be advantageous to have such a standard.