Theodore wrote: > 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.
It does not. My employers are phasing out their Linux desktop applications, presumably owning to lack of demand for them. Linux is important for us as a server platform for enterprise-level products, but the dominance of Red Hat, plus SUSE in Europe, means there isn't a problem for those products, and they've never felt the need to adopt LSB. > 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. Money might have been available, but I was never able to make a case that paying for it would save us more than it would cost. It made the Linux part of my life easy (about 15% of my job), and did the same for, at most, ten other engineers spread across a company of 5,000 or so at the time. There would not have been a major problem if we'd had to stop using LSB: we just weren't that dependent on it. Alan wrote: > Given the potential to have someone with ill intent controlling it due to > lack of > real interest from actual involved parties it would IMHO be far better it was > officially > deprecated as historic only. That's a fair point. -- John Dallman DI SW TO OT PC PDE Technology & Innovation Nullius in verba Siemens Industry Sector Siemens Industry Software Limited Francis House, 112 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 1PH, United Kingdom Tel. :+44 (1223) 371554 Fax :+44 (1223) 371700 [email protected] www.siemens.com/plm > -----Original Message----- > From: Theodore Y. Ts'o <[email protected]> > Sent: 23 August 2019 14:44 > To: Dallman, John (DI SW TO OT PC PDE) <[email protected]> > Cc: Mats Wichmann <[email protected]>; [email protected]; Bruce Dubbs > <[email protected]>; [email protected] > Subject: Re: [lsb-discuss] ISO LSB standard > > 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 ----------------- Siemens Industry Software Limited is a limited company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 3476850. 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