The Triangle

Issue date: 10/8/04 Section: Sci-Tech
Originally published: 10/8/04 at 1:11 AM EST
Last update: 1/7/05 at 1:23 PM EST

Media Credit: http://www.linuxbase.org The LSB stamp.

Picture a future devoid of all happiness and freedom. The poor are scrounging for pennies and pieces of bread to survive on, while the rich are lounging in front of lavish fireplaces, smoking on expensive humidors, grinning. What self respecting businessman wouldn't be proud of himself for surviving the few years of turmoil during early and mid oughts? After all, they were the ones who survived those troubled times by sticking with the corporations and fighting off the open source epidemic. Now those poor Linux-loving hippies are starving to death, wishing they had sided with the big Scrooge, Bill Gates.

No, this is not the future yet, but it is one of the many possible futures that the Ghost of Linux Future has predicted. Without any clear-cut plan, Linux and the open source community will surely collapse; at the very least, stagnate and fade away like all ridiculously successful fads. However, as long as open source activists and those in the Linux political scene play their cards right, open source will be here for a long time and this future will never occur. The dilemma lies in which direction Linux should go and which goals should be set.

One of the biggest difficulties Linux and open source as a whole faces is standardization. One of the main purposes and selling points of Linux are its openness to endless possibilities and applications. Linux was raised on the principles of adaptability and configurability. How many other operating systems are flexible enough to record television programs on a TiVo, provide internet access through home routers, drive Spirit and Opportunity across the barren Martian terrain, and still be a desktop operating system to boot?

Unfortunately, too much of anything can end up being detrimental in the long run. One of the biggest problems software developers face is adapting their software to work with all distributions. Though this doesn't seem like a difficult task, it can rapidly get out of control. Each distribution of Linux is slightly different, and it can become a nightmare if a developer is working on a large scale product for Linux. Simple things such as installation procedures and locating other programs can become a challenge. This is where the Free Standards Group comes in with their Linux Standard Base (LSB). The goal of the LSB is to create general standards for the different Linux distributions to follow, including standard libraries, utilities, the layout of the filesystem hierarchy, and even standard installation methods.

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