On Wednesday 08 June 2005 07:03, joseph mpora wrote: > I think they do linux a disservice in this regard. > Every distro should be pushing for compatability with > the others. Defragmentation within the linux camp is > keeping linux behind. I respect the work SuSe puts > into their distro but this work is only useful to > others if they can use it easily. In a way they are > discouraging you from using any other distro but SuSe > (I believe many other distros have similar practices). > Isn't this the vendor lockin we are all criticising > Microsoft for?
Perhaps we are taking this out of context... Linux is based on open-standards software, and like most other open-standards applications/protocols, the inherent design properties need to be maintained across various platforms, but (de)finite implementation may differ as per vendor wishes. Take a good example of BGP - open-standards, but actual commands vary (greatly) among vendor implementation, e.g., Cisco, Juniper, Quagga, Zebra, OpenBGPd, e.t.c. Same goes for OSPF, 802.1q, e.t.c. Coming back to Linux, IIRC, the LSB standards were created to ensure compatibility among the different distributions (just as well, competition is healthy as long as the end goal remains in focus), but I feel a vendor should be free to implement an open technology in a way he feels its users would be very comfortable using. We need to be a little realistic, if all Linux vendors distribute the (fundamentally) same base systems, then why would one be better than the other? I think that would be anti-competitive, and go on to kill innovation. On the flip-side, if RedHat distributed the true copy of Apache on the CD's, but SuSE created their own web server and called it Apache, then that's another issue. Mark.
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