On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 10:11:03AM +0000, Dallman, John wrote:
>
> LSB is at a point now where it can either be left to decline, or
> re-vitalized. The latter requires the Linux Foundation to either see
> it as a priority, or transfer the project to someone with money and
> energy to push it forwards.
The real problem is that there isn't any business case for someone
*with* money to invest in the LSB. The big money in Linux these days
can be found in:
*) Android, and other mobile use OS's
*) Embedded systems
*) Cloud applications
In none of these cases does ABI compliance matter. There will be a
few companies that care about running Oracle or DB2, but they'll use
an enterprise Linux distro for that, and the rest of their servers or
VM's will run some other distribution and the applications will be
almost all open source or based on open source.
You can see that in a demo IBM did showing off Linux running their
latest Mainframe a few years ago. What software did they have running
on the Linux-on-zSeries? Was it Websphere and DB2? No, it was MySQL,
Apache, and PHP. <Insert sad trombone noise here, at least for IBM
Software Group>.
The other reason why HP, IBM, and other companies were pushing for ISO
adoption of LSB, way back when, was strictly mercenary. There were
some governments in Europe where having the ISO imprimatur made it
easier to sell into those markets, and so that was worth the large
amount of additional dollars needed to fund national body
representatives, etc., to attend the necessary ISO meetings to make
ISO/IEC 23360-2006 happen.
But in the intervening ten years, Linux has gained a lot more
credibility. And, given the ISO/IEC 29500:2008 debacle, ISO has lost
a lot of credibility. Hence, I can't see any interest at *all* in
companies being willing to invest in further ISO standardization of
anything relating to Linux. Linux moves too quickly, and ISO moves
too slowly, and its insistence on voting based on national bodies
means that very few open source communities will be willing to trust
it for anything.
Of course, ISO standardization is independent of continuing investment
in the LSB. And there, it all comes down to funding. The Linux
Foundation acts based on the direction (and especially, funding) of
its sponsors. Let's look at their current Platinum sponsors:
* AT&T
* Cisco
* Fujitsu
* Google
* Hitachi
* Huawei
* IBM
* Intel
* Microsoft
* NEC
* Oracle
* Qualcomm
* Samsung
* Tencent
* VMWare
How many of the above companies have a business model which is
dependent on the distribution of portability of commercial binaries to
run across multiple Linux distributions? None.
And given the dominance of Red Hat in the enterprise market, and the
shrinking importance of the enterprise market in terms of companies
making money working with Linux, this shouldn't come as a surprise.
Now, there will be some smaller ISV's, such as John, that would find
that it saves them testing and porting effort if something like the
LSB would exist and was strong and vibrant. And I feel very badly for
John, since he has been a long-time, loyal supporter of the LSB. But
these smaller ISV's don't have funds to do the detailed engineering
work which is necessary to update the LSB.
Finally, we can't ignore the emergence of alternative packaging
technologies where the application is bundled together with all of its
run-time libraries. These includes AWS and GCE VM images which
include Oracle and Red Hat which are pre-installed and pre-tested. It
also includes flatpak and Snap. With all of these technologies the
LSB is moot, since it includes the userspace libraries needed by the
application. There are some downsides, of course. Chief among them
is the fact that if there is a security vulnerability in a core
library, such as glibc, it must be patched in all of the flatpaks and
snaps and docker images, et. al. The record to date on this happening
is at best mediocre, if not downright bad. On the upside, the
application vendor only needs to test how their application works with
a single set of runtime libraries, and a flatpak or snap will run on
essentially run on any Linux distribution without needing to do any
kind of compliance or conformance work.
It pains me all to say all of this since I was present at the very
beginnings of the LSB, and was on the founding board of the Free
Standards Group. But alas, given today's realities, the LSB is no
longer relevant. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is the fact
that the ISO is interested in pursuing further standardization work on
it.
Regards,
- Ted
_______________________________________________
lsb-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lsb-discuss
