Linux players bond for business software (News.com) [LWN.net]

Here is another article on News.com about UnitedLinux. "However, the lack of participation by Red Hat in the UnitedLinux alliance is a problem, analysts said. UnitedLinux is redundant to the Linux Standard Base specification backed by Red Hat, according to IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky."

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Linux players bond for business software (News.com)

Posted Jun 1, 2002 1:06 UTC (Sat) by garloff (subscriber, #319) [Link] (1 responses)

Since when is RedHat behind LSB? It would be extremely nice if they were.

Linux players bond for business software (News.com)

Posted Jun 1, 2002 2:31 UTC (Sat) by lordsutch (guest, #53) [Link]

All of the distributors involved in United Linux are involved in the LSB effort, as are Debian, Mandrake, and Red Hat.

IMHO United Linux is more an effort to pool resources on maintaining core packages than an effort to provide a common distro. It only makes sense for everyone who's using RPM format packages to do that; otherwise, it's duplicated effort. The trick is to do it in a way that doesn't hurt building on the core.

Linux players bond for business software (News.com)

Posted Jun 1, 2002 1:17 UTC (Sat) by subhasroy (guest, #325) [Link] (3 responses)

Make LSB comprehensive and consensus-based and make all major distros compliant to LSB. I don't care whether there are 1 or 150 distributions as long as the free and commercial software vendors can write and distribute software for one target.

Linux players bond for business software (News.com)

Posted Jun 1, 2002 4:25 UTC (Sat) by walt-sjc (guest, #394) [Link]

Um, applications can already be written to run on virtually all distros. Look at acrobat reader, netscape, mozilla, oracle, realplayer, xfree86, etc., etc., etc. One binary. The LSB will NOT fix things like library version issues for dynamically linked apps. An example nightmare would be the development version of Enlightenment which has a bazillion dependancies.

If you want linux easier to administer, then we DO have some work to do. Most distros have their own packaging system, unique rc scripts, configuration files (network settings... etc.) and THAT's where the larger problem lies.

Linux players bond for business software (News.com)

Posted Jun 1, 2002 5:34 UTC (Sat) by DeletedUser416 ((unknown), #416) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know if one absolute standard is necessary, but if it could be reduced to two or three competing standards, it would sure be a lot less of a headache for ISV's then the hodge-podge there is now. But that seems to be happening, anyway. Now we'll have the United Linux standard, the Red Hat/Mandrake standard, and the Debian standard. Still more painful than one standard, but not really substantialy more painful than developing for the various versions of Windows. The market seems to be sorting out the standards issue pretty well by itself. It will just take some time. Some consolodation is inevitable.

Linux players bond for business software (News.com)

Posted Jun 3, 2002 14:14 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Now we'll have the United Linux standard, the Red Hat/Mandrake standard, and the Debian standard.

Well, when everything has been sorted out, and reality has been distilled from all the marketing crap and posturing, it looks like we'll have three dominant implementations (RH/Mdk, UL, and Deb) of a single standard, the LSB. But it's hard to tell for sure, since UL is such a strange thing. From what I can tell their real aim is to create an implementation-based "standard" based on a standard-by-committee (LSB) to compete with Red Hat, the current defacto implementation-based "standard." That's weird.