Wouter Verhelst wrote:When I founded the LSB, the job I proposed for it was to do what the LCC is now proposing to do. I didn't believe that a paper standard alone would be effective at resolving cross-distribution compatibility issues, and it has proven not to be. A paper standard is certainly a helpful thing to have around, though, because it helps focus policy discussion and record the result.To address these issues, the Free Software people created the LSB This is sophistry. LCC would be constructed of Free Software and would itself be no less free than Debian main.That is, indeed, one way to solve it: throwing out the Freedom we, Free Software developers, have, and slowly starting to move towards a non-free platform. Here I can turn your own argument upon itself. Why do we create paper standards? One important reason is that in the world of proprietary software, vendors would not share their source code, so they had to define what the program would do in human language instead. A paper standard is a second-hand description of something that our community has the unique ability to share, bypassing the paper.They should tell us where the standard is not clear enough, or where the issues with the LSB are, so that they can be solved. The essential technical problem with the LSB is that it is not sufficiently descriptive of every thing that a modern application must depend on, and is not within 10 years of being sufficiently descriptive at the rate that its development has been going. In addition, it is not the best possible technical solution to getting a bunch of Free Software-based distributions to be more compatibile with each other. Thanks Bruce |