Submitted for your approval: White paper draft

John H Terpstra jht at turbolinux.com
Wed Apr 5 09:29:34 PDT 2000



On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Ralf Flaxa wrote:

> Dear Evan,
> 
> On Wed, Apr 05, 2000 at 11:17:42AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> > 
> > One could easily suggest that Linux ISVs already have had a "standard"
> > with which to work -- the Red Hat way of doing things. If LSB fails to
> > deliver -- and indeed what's happening by those who can't wait -- without
> > a mutually-agreed standard, ISVs (and many free-software developers too)
> > are simply targeting Red Hat and letting other distros figure out how to
> > cope with being Red Hat compatible.
> 
> Well, this is partially true only. Other distros have also brought products
> to Linux, first on their platform, where RedHat then had to figure out how
> to make that work. I don't think this has been done intentionally. I rather
> think every distro just tried to help to bring more software to the Linux
> platform. But I agree with you that it is bad anyway if it works on some
> distros only and thus only some Linux users can benefit from it and not all.
> 
> The goal should be to bring as many apps to Linux as possible and make them
> run on any distro available.
> 
> That is the reason why LSB is so important and why all distros are supporting
> it. Even though many people out there try to spread the "it does not move
> fast enough, so it will not work" message I can tell you that there is a
> great deal of commitment from all distros now trying to make it happen.
> 
> Caldera has now 4 people working fulltime on that and other distros have
> agreed to also put more engineering resources behind it.
> 
> Maybe someone from SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake or Turbo could comment on that
> to make people see, that this is really the case ;-)

I am completely convinced that all Linux distributions are committed to
interoperability. We are all working on making this happen. I concur with
the above remarks and want this to be clearly seen as the position
TurboLinux has taken also.

> 
> You will see the fruits of it soon, so if you want to help then do rather
> play the advocate for it than questioning it publically. I appreciate your
> input and comments, but I feel they have an "undertone" of pessimism.
> 
> > > In addition, LSB will help coordinate efforts to recruit software
> > > vendors to port and write products for Linux.
> > 
> > Pardon? Since when is LSB taking a co-ordinating an ISV advocacy role? I
> > don't recall that being determnined, ever. It certainly wasn't part of the
> > original endorsement by LI.
> 
> Look at the mission statement at www.linuxbase.org. This message is there
> for a long time already.
> 



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