Standards set to stop the Linux splitters

By Stephen Shankland

Efforts to prevent Linux from splitting into several incompatible versions - a problem that has in the past hobbled Unix, the operating system upon which Linux is modeled - have moved several steps ahead.

Last week, three versions of Linux - Red Hat 7.3, SuSE 8.0 Professional and Mandrake ProSuite 8.2 - became the first products certified to comply with the guidelines of the Linux Standard Base (LSB).

The LSB, administered by the Free Standards Group, a non-profit organisation of software developers and information technology industry members, standardises many of the basic parts of Linux while allowing companies to add their own features on top of that foundation.

The issue of Linux unity has even acquired some political overtones as Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, a recent Linux convert, pledged LSB support at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo while carping that Red Hat's top-end edition isn't compliant.

Avoiding fragmentation is a crucial challenge for the commercial success of Linux, which depends in part on the support of software companies such as Oracle. If software companies have to support several incompatible versions of Linux, they'll shy away.

Linux is "not nearly as fragmented as Unix became in the 1980s, but there are significant differences which impact developers," said Nick Christenson, senior analyst at file storage software maker Sistina Software.

But LSB certification, while helpful in preventing Linux from fragmenting into incompatible versions that can't run the same software, isn't all that's needed to make versions of Linux interchangeable. Some software needing particular high-performance features bypasses the domain of LSB, reaching directly into the heart, or kernel, of Linux, an area LSB won't standardise.

"Typically what happens if you don't have something like LSB is that you get such stupid, thoughtless variations between platforms that you just want to throw your hands up," said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice. But such standards efforts lag real-world practices by years and don't govern everything. "They cover the basics, but an operating system is a really complicated piece of machinery."

The LSB has been under development for years but progress has recently been hastened.

The LSB isn't the only unification effort afoot. Several Linux sellers are using the exact same Linux software through the UnitedLinux alliance, while the Embedded Linux Consortium has created a first-draft proposal for standardising Linux in computing devices such as network routers or factory robots.

Stephen Shankland writes for ZDNet Australia