Re: Submitted for your approval: White paper draft

[Nicholas Petreley <nicholas@petreley.com>]

Ralph,

Again, thanks for the input.  Here's how I handled the single authority vs. open source stability/compatibility issue:

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...blah, blah about replacing existing libraries, which breaks application compatibility...blah

This approach also brings to Linux a level of backward compatibility that is often lacking in legacy proprietary operating systems under the control of a single commercial authority.  Whether intentional or accidental, proprietary operating system vendors may keep competitors off-balance by replacing core libraries with new versions or incremental updates.   Unfortunately, customers cannot avoid the unpredictable behavior that results by confining the changes to their operating sytems to official OS updates or service packs. These proprietary systems are often updated (or even downgraded) automatically when customers install commercial applications.  

Fortunately, the Open Source nature of Linux already makes it nearly impossible for any single Linux provider to make standards a moving target in this manner, because the latest versions of core Linux libraries are freely available by all regardless of the Linux distribution you use.  But LSB adds one more level of insurance. Regardless of how updates to an LSB compliant Linux offering occur, they will not break LSB compliant applications since the LSB libraries will remain untouched.  

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Shucks, nobody noticed the order of my command examples...

cat, sleep, more, man, sed, nice, tail


;-)

-Nick

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Nicholas Petreley                   LinuxWorld - InfoWorld
nicholas@petreley.com - http://www.petreley.com - Eph 6:12
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