Debian dropping the Linux Standard Base

So I'm a bit biased about this. I used to be employed by the LF to work on the LSB (circa 2008). I worked for two long years striving to make the LSB relevant.

The problems the Debian developers point out are nothing new. The LSB has had these problems for years.

The crux of the problem is that the LSB is a trailing standard and that it has (or had, I honestly can't say for certain if this is still the case) a heavy corporate interest. This creates a situation where the LSB is always REACTING to the changing Linux distro universe, which means it can never, really, be relevant as it is always just a bit out of date. In turn, this creates problems for distros wanting to be LSB compliant as they, essentially, have to have these backwards shims in place to keep the LSB checkers happy.

The LSB's modus operandi is to debate and reach consensus on each and every change. On paper, this sounds good. However, in practice it's absolutely miserable. It means that discussions drag on forever and things are added, updated, or removed long after they've ceased to be relevant in mainstream distros. Additionally, you have corporations (or had, again, it could be different) which would lobby for particular technologies and often get them included in the LSB not based upon technical merit but instead upon how much noise the company was able to generate with the LSB and the Linux Foundation. Personally, I butted against this problem back in my day at the LSB as a major change I thought was absolutely stupid (allowing non-root users to modify package management DBs like the RPM DB- a feature MANY companies trying to make packages for Linux wanted at the time) kept being brought up again and again largely because the companies in question were also Linux Foundation contributors. (This change never made it in, of course, as doing so would have made every distro in the world reject it, but it didn't change the fact that the stupid suggestion kept getting proposed and shot down on a nearly monthly basis and that there was pressure from management in the LF to keep these companies happy since they were giving so much money.)

The only solution to these problems is to ditch the "LSB by committee" approach and, instead, have the LSB be semi auto-magickally generated based upon what REAL distros are doing. We had this tool at the time (which was made by researchers at a major computer science academy) which could analyze the ABI interfaces available in a given distro (the tool was intended to be used as a way to easily determine LSB compliance). That tool could have easily been used to determine ABI commonality among major distros, which could have then been used to defined the LSB in a very relevant and real way. Re-running this tool every 6 months or so, and generating the LSB based upon what the distros were actually doing, would have kept the LSB current. This was something I advocated for at the time, but was ultimately rejected (again, largely because of the corporate interests involved that had very specific agendas for the LSB).

Anyway, while it makes me sad to see the LSB fall further into obscurity (it really was a good idea and had noble goals) this doesn't exactly surprise me
because it was something easily predictable as far back as 2008.