[lsb-discuss] LSB conf call notes for 2008-07-30

Ron Hale-Evans rwhe at ludism.org
Sat Aug 9 10:42:24 PDT 2008


On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 2:26 AM, Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
> With the rest of the LSB it is specified on functionality without a
> series dependency on non-free stuff. If the FSF go nutty Linux can carry
> on fine without them as can the LSB. There is no 'test suite' owned by
> the FSF that could be used to push an agendum.

The bedrock of the FOSS community is often non-free. For example, the
last time I looked, the GPL is not itself licensed in such a way that
people can change it. What's "worse" is that many orgs license their
code and docs with the boilerplate that says you have access to their
code under GPL version x.y /or any later version/. That means if the
FSF does go nutty, a lot of projects are hosed. (IMHO, YMMV, IANAL,
etc.)

> The political consequences are enormous too I would add - the LSB would
> cease in many government environments to be classfied as "open standard"
> as it would have proprietary dependencies. That would prevent governments
> from specifying LSB compliance in some jurisdictions.

This is in interesting point. However, is a test suite really a
dependency? You can build Java without the tests and even incorporate
it into your distro; you just can't call it "Java" or use any other
Sun trademarks.

Ron



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