Additional Vendors Participate in Growing LSB Effort

August 26th, 1998

Additional Vendors Participate in Growing LSB Effort

LCS founders join the LSB project

We are happy to announce that the founders of the Linux Compatibility Standards (LCS) Project, a collaboration of Debian and Red Hat, will work on Linux standards as part of the LSB effort. Now that the LSB Project combines the original focus of the LSB with the goals of the LCS, the LCS founders see no need for any separate standardization effort.

LSB elects new chair and forms 3 technical sub-projects

After Bruce Perens departed on August 10th, it was necessary to find a new chair for the LSB organization. It was felt by several vendors that such a chair should be impartial and thus not from any Linux vendor. The new chair of the LSB Steering Committee is Daniel Quinlan (head of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/).

Originally, the focus of the LSB project was to produce a Linux reference platform that would define a standard Linux. Any program that ran successfully on the reference platform could be expected to run on all compliant Linux systems. An LSB written standard and test suite were secondary goals.

As discussion of how to develop the reference platform continued, it became obvious that without active work on a written standard and a test suite, that the LSB project wouldn't be successful in achieving its goals. Therefore, the LSB project has now reorganized into three technical sub-committee projects of equal importance, each with a prominent technical lead.

These three groups will work together to develop a base standard for the Linux operating system as follows:

And when the above is not true, then something needs to be fixed. If it can't be figured out by the technical groups, then the steering committee will arbitrate.

Finally, the sample implementation will be composed entirely of free software and the test suite will be as free as the LSB can make it without rendering the test suite meaningless.

New LSB web site

There is now a web site for the LSB project: http://www.linuxbase.org/.

About the Linux Standard Base

The Linux Standard Base (LSB) is developing a set of standards that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable software applications to run on any compliant Linux system. The LSB will also help coordinate efforts to recruit software vendors to port and write products for Linux.

We have also created several open mailing lists (for more information, please see the LSB web site). The public at large are encouraged to subscribe to these lists, with a request that non-committee members lurk quietly.

The list of individuals and organizations participating in the LSB effort or endorsing the LSB includes:

(For the growing list of participants, please check www.linuxbase.org.)

Contact Information

For further information, please send email to press@linuxbase.org or visit the Linux Standard Base home page at http://www.linuxbase.org/.