Debian Founder Ian Murdock Appointed CTO of the Free Standards Group [LWN.net]

The Free Standards Group (FSG) has announced that Debian founder Ian Murdock has been appointed its chief technology officer and elected chair of the Linux Standard Base workgroup. "As founder of Debian -- one of the most successful open source projects in history -- and commercial custom Linux platform provider Progeny, Murdock brings unmatched experience building open source communities, driving technical consensus and solving Linux distribution challenges. His experience will immediately enhance the open standards initiatives of the Free Standards Group and the Linux Standard Base."

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Debian Founder Ian Murdock Appointed CTO of the Free Standards Group

Posted Feb 6, 2006 14:21 UTC (Mon) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

Hm. Will this lead to some resolution of the tension between Linux Standard Base (requires RPM) and Debian (supports RPM, but prefers .deb)?

Or is that tension already resolved and I missed the memo?

Debian Founder Ian Murdock Appointed CTO of the Free Standards Group

Posted Feb 6, 2006 17:38 UTC (Mon) by mikec (guest, #30884) [Link]

There may not have been a memo, but the deafening silence surrounding LSB seems, in may cases, to have spoken for itself...

For binary vendors using C++ (that will teach them!), the "flexibility" of the ABI rendered all the other specifications somewhat moot... Everyone else seems to just use autoconf and not care...

As for .rpm or .deb, hopefully now that apt, yum and the like are widely deployed and working, the concern for the container will die down.

However, so long as other large differences between the RedHat, Slackware and Debian systems remain, different "containers" have to be built for each (in many/most cases), so the end users don't' really care as long it is just works on their systems...

For myself, the begrudging move from Slackware to RedHat was relatively painless, but now I have to actually think (and read) when I try to decipher a Knoppix system and it hurts... This is the real insidious nature of GUIs at work.

If you hide everything behind eye-candy, then no one notices what is going on underneath and things begin to speciate unintentionally. RedHat is just as culpable, if not more, as anyone else. I grow weary of deleting cryptic entries in /etc/sysconfig/networking that seem entirely redundant.