The was a great LSB article published a few days ago by ZDNet. As well as covering the background really well, it presents the problem in a nutshell. It's unclear if that was the intention. Scarey quotes:
- "Pressure from enterprises could also be essential. Some large companies, such as Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), have already announced they will only deploy LSB-compliant software, and those kinds of announcements could be the spur that ISVs need."
- "There is lots of momentum around the LSB, with many key players in the industry supporting it, but still not enough active involvement from ISVs certifying their applications," says Dirk Hohndel, director of Linux and open source strategy at Intel, who is a member of the FSG's board of directors. Partly, this is because ISVs have baseless fears about the cost and complexity around an LSB certification, Hohndel says. [Ed. — Not sure how baseless they are.]
- For application makers it comes down to a financial decision, according to Red Hat's [analyst relations manager Nick] Carr. "For many ISVs, the issue is of choosing a de facto standard versus a de jure standard. If the LSB is maturing from one release to the next, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is already established as a de facto standard, they might just choose to port their applications to something that is a known standard," he says.
- ISVs may be wary of fragmentation, but so far, LSB compliance hasn't come at the top of their list of priorities, says Carr. "They generally rank other issues, such as the development tool-chain, product support, features, and the overall ecosystem -- the presence of other ISVs and OEMs - first." This isn't as big a problem as it seems, he says, because Red Hat's close adherence to the specification guarantees a certain degree of LSB application support.
Red Hat certainly doesn't want to give up market share, so quickly positions themselves as the same only better. Some might remember the incredible UNIX 95 branding program announcements a decade ago where the UNIX vendors of the day that first branded (IBM, and Sun certainly, maybe NCR?) all had marketing quotes in the primary OpenGroup press release on UNIX branding where they sang the praises of their AIX and Solaris brands without ever mentioning the "U" word they had just worked so hard to obtain. Irony is a wonderful wonderful thing.
The ISVs can't be "forced" to warrant their applications. I describe that problem last week, and in more detail relating to the UNIX app branding programs of yore in an old somewhat wordy ACM paper. (My apologies if you read it. To quote Voltaire, I didn't have time to write it shorter.) If you crawl the FSG/Opengroup application certification policy, program, the Trade Mark License Agreement, etc. you won't find that forced insanity. However, an application brand apparently warrants that you run on an LSB certified implementation of your choice, an LSB certified implementation of the certifying agency's choice, and the LSB sample implementation. It's unclear to me what value this has to whom.
Don't get me wrong. The LSB and implementation certification is essential for expanding the deployment of Linux in the enterprise. Everything Jim Zemlim says about standards and customer buying habits is true. But forcing app branding is the wrong place to put pressure. This is NOT the same situation as the Windows branding programs Microsoft put together. That was a very different set of programs with a different set of goals under the control of a single vendor. The economics of this situation is very different. We do need to find a solution here.
Links:
- The LSB Branding site
- A Microsoft Branding program (for contrast)
Comments