The Free Standards Group, the non-profit group behind the Linux Standard Base, has announced that Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock will be its new chief technology officer and will chair the LSB workgroup. A spokesperson for the FSG said that as co-founder of Debian Linux and the commercial custom Linux distributor Progeny, Murdock brings unmatched experience building open-source communities, driving technical consensus and solving Linux distribution challenges. Murdock has also been one of the leaders of the DCC Alliance.
…and it won’t be called ‘Linux Standard Base’ but simply ‘Ubuntu’. Now there’s a distro heading straight for becoming the de facto standard flavour of Linux.
No way. It won’t, because Linux means freedom of choice.
P.S. I didn’t like Ubuntu and I use Xandros.
Not likely. Ubuntu and Progeny take very different approaches, the former maintaining a limited subset of the available software while the latter creates internally compatible subsets to greatly simplify dependency resolution.
While Ubuntu is popular, Progeny is IMHO technically superior. I think Ian Murdock is exactly the sort of person needed to sort out the pointless mess that is the LSB.
While Ubuntu is popular, Progeny is IMHO technically superior.
Really? How exactly? I must admit that I never really informed myself on it… Even though I am posting in Ubuntu right now, I still favour Debian.
Technically surperior?! How do you think Progeny achieves “LSB Compliance”? They include two versions of the libraries needed to do so. Instead of doing it the correct way, they include a “compatibility layer” [1]. This is a hack at best and not the optimal way of doing things. Some core parts of debian (and DCC) need to be reworked for true LSB compliance.
If I have a very good digital japanese <—> english translator, can I go around advertising that I speak japanese? I suppose I could, but it would be incorrect.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2006-January/003630.html [1]
Edit: Look at point #3
Edited 2006-02-04 17:13
Hey folks, if you disagree with me – make a comment, don’t mod me down for stating a prediction.
This could prove incredibly interesting seeing as how LSB chose RPMs as a standard to go by. Could this maybe lead to making RPM and Debian based distros more compatible?
As far as I can tell, Red Hat is the standard. Third-party software is almost always targetted towards it (or sometimes SuSE). Ubuntu is a fad. It’s done great things, but let’s not pretend like it, or desktop Linux, is a serious matter in the greater computing industry.
Redhat is the corporate standard. Debian is the academic, scientific, ultra-democratic, non-profit standard.
While I congratulate Ian Murdock, on getting the position I’m also confused because of his background and the current LSB organization. Can someone please clarify if any Debian based distribution has been LSB certified? I thought only Novell, Red Hat, Mandriva and a few others were among the only companies to have received LSB certification for their software, none of which are Debian based. After all from the “LSB Certification Register” I don’t see anything that suggest Debian developers have passed LSB certification.
Reference:
http://www.linuxbase.org/
http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/
Can someone please clarify if any Debian based distribution has been LSB certified?
Yes. Progeny Componentized Linux.
http://componentizedlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page