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On 18-Aug-98 Darren Benham wrote:
The "Linux Standards Association" was just announced on slashdot and is drawing a lot of flack. I think the Linux community needs to take notice.
Read <A HREF="http://www.linuxstandards.org"><A HREF="http://www.linuxstandards.org</A">http://www.linuxstandards.org and see for yourself what's up. Reminds me of what almost (maybe did) happen to the X standard a few months back. They have all the bad charms, like vetos for paying members, the right to ban uncooperative members and (TM)'s all over the place.
The fact remains that these people claim to provide a standards and reference organisation for all Linux and they intend to sell (literally) their concept to Big Corporations interested in porting their software to Linux.
Before they get a foothold in too many doorsteps, SuSE, Red Hat, Debian and the users and developers in the Linux Community should take a good look at what's going on here and make a firm statement, ideally not in an uncontrolled screaming manner (which is probably going to happen in places like c.o.l.advocacy anyway.)
This looks like something that needs to be dealt with, either way.
Well, I went and looked at their Web site. They're clearly at the very
beginning and hardly anybody belongs to the LSA. There are no "ratified issues"
and no "open issues". Everything to play for.
Despite Darren's disparaging comments, the arguments on their home page to the
effect that, with increasing commercial interest in Linux the firms porting
their stuff to Linux will need to know what they are porting it to, are sound.
Hitherto, the tendency has been either for a firm to offer the Linux port
effectively unsupported, or to declare that (e.g.) it works on RedHat-4.1
(and, implcitly, if you run it on anything else and it doesn't work, then
you're on your own).
Linux is too much of a bear-pit for this to be straightforward for most firms.
There IS a need for a "common standard" that the firms can aim at and support.
Until Linux gets one, FreeBSD wpould be a much cleaner option, for instance.
LSA may not be the people to provide the standard we need, and they may not do
what we would wish with the standard they come up with; but something is
essential. That part of their manifesto can't be faulted.
Best wishes to all,
ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding)