Linux operating system

Linux community enraged by standards - Linux operating system

The creator of a new group to standardize Linux, the freely distributed operating system, says an uproar over membership fees and veto power show how badly a stable version of the platform is needed.

In August, NC Labs and Innovative Logic attracted a lot of attention from both users and vendors with the birth of the Linux Standards Association (LSA), a nonprofit organization that wants to define a standard for the OS. These standards would likely be based on existing Posix standards. The idea is to allow ISVs to port Linux applications using the same sort of standards that apply to Unix 98, thereby providing a comfort level to corporate CIOs who remain gun-shy over an OS without a single vendor supporting it.

Within the last month, members of the Linux community have erupted in protest over the LSA's proposal, many posting their objections through the Web site slashdot.org. The e-mails complain that the two founding "charter members," NC Labs and Innovative Logic, are largely unknown to the larger Linux community The critics say the LSA's membership fees and the veto control retained by the two founding companies do not constitute an open standards body.

Ian Nandhra, president of NC Labs and co-founder of the LSA, says while he was prepared for some of the negative reaction, the furor has exceeded his expectations.

"The stuff you read on the Net is kind of hysterical and really over the top," he says. "The real audience for it is the ISV community. I get involved in a lot of Linux retail sales. As a retailer, if I sell 20 office applications to a customer, it's always done with a slight amount of trepidation that in two months' time that customer's going to come back complaining like crazy that his entire office doesn't work because he's just upgraded to the latest version of Linux and everything's now broken."

The reason for the trepidation is that right now, Linux can be freely modified by individual developers. This lack of standardization can raise problems when different applications have to work together, or when an application has to work with different hardware configurations.

Nandhra also argues that without membership fees, companies with vested interests in Linux would have the same level of input as teenagers who are just fooling around.

The LSA has yet to set a timeline to define a standard, but is planning to offer a trademarked "Standard Linux" for ISVs based on a test suite of programs to certify products (see www.linuxstandards.org).

Noticeably absent from the membership roster are well-known Linux distributors Red Hat Software and Caldera. Bob Young, president of Red Hat Software in Research Triangle Park, NC, says his company isn't getting involved.

"The real problem I have with it is that these guys are touting themselves as somehow speaking for the Linux community." He says his opinion is the LSA has "virtually no support in the Linux space."

But Nandhra says the furor on the Internet does not truly represent the LSA's popularity in the Linux community.

"The fact that someone isn't high-profile in Linux doesn't necessarily mean that they know nothing, or that they have nothing to contribute. It could mean that they have a day job."

Support from Linux developers will be critical, some say, if the standards effort is to get results. At press time, the LSA has signed just one paying member.

"I find myself wondering how that (the LSA's standardized version of Linux) would be different from one of the distributions that's already been so successful," says Mike Tossy, director of marketing at InterBase Software. The company has just enhanced its VAR program to reflect its support for Linux (see Profiles, page 24). "If Red Hat and Caldera aren't involved, I don't think it's going to go anywhere."