Once More unto the Breach

OSDL Summit: Jim Zemlin on App Portability on Linux

Jim Zemlin (Executive Director, Free Standards Group) gave the afternoon tutorial Application Portability in a Linux Environment.  This was the business backing tutorial for Mats technical howto of the morning.  Chris Maresca (Olliance Group) delivered part of the presentation as well.

It was a well delivered presentation, but raised all the problems and questions around application certification.  Implementation certification to the LSB (i.e. the distros) is fundamentally important and necessary for the growth of Linux systems in the mainstream.  The forward/backward compatibility problem will be fundamentally a distro or system vendor quality of service issue and the "best" vendor will support the most for their ISVs and customers, just like every other real operating system has done.  (A friend that worked at Digital Equipment Corp through the VMS 5.0 release remembers unpacking old DECUS tapes of RSX binaries to ensure they all still ran correctly.) 

Application certification seems less certain.  Not surprisingly there are very very few app certs compared to the growing list of implementation certs.  The idea of a "conforming application" goes back to the C language standard (1989) as a way to describe something a "conforming implementation" had to run.  It was not valuable in its own right.  The idea that an ISV (i.e. the app vendor) wants to certify the app rather than gaining the engineering efficiency and expediency of targeting certified platforms seems a reach. 

• The Technical Problem:  Getting a simple app to build that is binary portable is relatively straight forward.  Getting complex apps to build and then guarantee they will work on systems against which you haven't tested (but are certified) is a technology gamble that can hurt your customers.
• The Customer Problem:  When the app breaks on an implementation (not if), the customer is left arguing with the app vendor and the implementation vendor as to who is responsible.  Not a good customer position.
• The Business Problem:  I will ship and support and maintain apps on platforms against which I test.  I will not warrant to ship on any other platform. 

The FSG sees these problems and is wrestling with them in a very inclusive discussion.  It will be fascinating to see where this lands. 

Cynical Observation of the Day:  Every one assumes the UNIX standards efforts "failed", and often link this indirectly to the subsequent rise of the PC.  I observed for the room that maybe they didn't actually fail from the vendor point of view.  This was taken to mean that I considered that POSIX/UNIX are a success.  Well, yes, because as an app developer I can write infinitely more portable code today on UNIX-based systems than I could 15 years ago.  But what I meant was their effort did exactly what it was supposed to do: supplant DEC's dominance on minicomputers, and the PC rise was actually in a different plane of competition.  I'll save that discussion for another day.  But it is relevant to this whole app portability issue.

Links:

• Application Portability in a Linux Environment
• The Free Standards Group website.  Information promoting the Free Standards Group, why your organization cares, getting involved, the projects, etc.
• I'll try for his slides as well.

OSDL Summit: Mats Wichmann on LSB Compliant Apps

Mats Wichmann (Intel) started my day with his tutorial on Building LSB Compliant Applications.  (LSB ≡ Linux Standards Base, an application binary interface standard to support binary portability. POSIX and the Single UNIX Spec are application programming interface standards to support source code portability.) You want to use the LSB when can't or don't want to ship the source code for an application. 

I bring a lot of bias and baggage here.  I have lived through the UNIX vendor standards wars of the early 1990s, watched the failure of various cross architecture ABI efforts (AIM, Monterrey), and have been historically (hysterically?) sceptical of application branding or certification efforts.  (There is no business model for the ISV for various technical, business, and customer reasons.)   

That said, Mats did a great job of introducing the tools and development and test environments the LSB effort has developed to ease an application developers efforts.  Without tripping any of my biases around actual app certification, he started with a simple "hello, world" style app to demonstrate the initial toolset, then scaled the demo up to a more complex effort to deal with the differences between the LSB use of dynamic libraries, your own application's shared libraries, and statically linked libraries. 

Links:

• Building LSB Compliant Applications
• The Linux Standards Base website.  Start crawling here to learn about the standard, the standards efforts, and the tools, etc.
• Mats will send me the link to his slides when they go up online. 

Bound for the OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit

I'm heading for the OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit at an ungodly hour in the morning.  Monday is tutorials, and Tuesday-Wednesday are the sessions.  I am hoping for conference connectivity and will be blogging sessions as I go.  If you're also attending the summit and aren't blogging it yourself, I would be happy to funnel your conference reports through here.  I used to edit the USENIX standards reports and have a few simple rules:

• Facts are expressed as facts and opinions are clearly marked as opinions.
• I do get to edit things into the best standard Canadian English I can muster as I think necessary.
• Tell me how you want to be attributed.  Name?  Name and email?  Anonymous.
• There is no "correct" format: report on what makes sense to report.  The session overall, the discussion, relevant links, whatever.   
• I would ask in this case you also include the link from the OSDL Summit web site for the session your reporting so we're all clear on title and presenter.

If anyone is really keen on helping, I can try to figure out how to add an author to the blog for the conference.   

• The OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit
• The conference at a glance

I'm staying at the Hyatt.

When are you going to sue your customers?

I've decided it's time to blog.  I (naively) believe I have something to say, and through the encouragement of friends I will try it out on the rest of you.  Of course I've never been able to follow instructions, so the first thing I actually wanted to talk about was more of an essay, than a post, and so that's how I've published it.  I'm tired of the constant fear mongering around intellectual property and open source software and "enterprises being sued" and thought it time to offer a different opinion.  It's called "When are you going to sue your customers?"