LSB 2.0 drives Linux interoperability

Johannesburg, 20 Sept 2004

Last week`s announcement by the Free Standard Group of the availability of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) 2.0 is good news for the long-term market success of Linux in the South African industry, says Obsidian Systems.

LSB is a way of ensuring software programs written for one Linux variant will work with others.

"The agreement is aimed at preventing Linux from suffering fragmentation by splintering into varying and competing distributions, as happened years ago with the Unix operating system," says Nols de Wet, marketing director at Obsidian Systems.

"From a South African perspective that is absolutely awesome and a much needed initiative. It will address the perception that Linux will become fragmented and therefore cause interoperability and management problems for managers and users a like."

Distributions that comply with the LSB achieve interoperability with application software written to the standard, and it has earned support from the majority of Linux distribution vendors throughout the world, including Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and Turbolinux.

New features delivered in this release include the long-awaited inclusion of a new application binary interface for C++ and support for 32- and 64-bit hardware architectures.

The LSB specification contains a base set of APIs, libraries and interoperability standards. It also includes test suites, development environments, sample implementations and developer documentation.

Until recently, says De Wet, IT managers that have not been paying serious attention have found that Linux has proliferated into their organisations from the bottom upwards in various forms, guises and distributions.

"This in itself presents the IT manager with a totally new challenge: that of gaining control of these Linux installations, managing current and future growth of the installations, and removing the headaches of configuring and maintaining applications for each of the different distributions."

He says the LSB will also provide the developer with exactly what is needed, namely one way of doing things no matter the flavour of Linux, which in turn allows users the freedom to choose and use their favourite Linux distribution, whatever it may be.

"LSB will thus foster and accelerate the adoption of Linux into South African businesses by addressing and removing the risk of the fragmentation barrier," says De Wet.