Open
Source Round-Up
There
is always something going on in the Open Source landscape.
A few items of note:
LSB Finds A New Home
The
Free Standards Group has been formed to nurture Linux Standard Base
(LSB) (a specification for the basic, interoperability-insured part
of Linux), which was in danger with the melting of United Linux.
The group will work in conjunction with OSDL; for example,
there will be tutorials on how to write applications to the LSB at
OSDL’s Linux Summit in January.
A
new version of LSB, LSB 2.0 has also been announced. This new specification has been split into functional areas,
to allow interested parties to work only in their areas of interest.
It supports the IA-32 and -64 platforms, the IBM PowerPC, the
System 390 and 390X, and the AMD-64 as well as support for C++.
All of the major Linux distributions, systems, and chip
vendors supported the announcements, good news for those who fear
that Linux might otherwise be forked (divided) as happened with
earlier UNIX distributions.
But
we note that each Linux distribution offers its own distinct
offerings above the Linux Standard Base. This makes it a bit harder
(but not impossible) for users to change from one Linux platform to
another and take their applications with them.
Information
on the Free Standards Group and LSB 2.0 is at www.freestandards.org.
Novell’s Linux Desktop
At
Gartner’s Symposium this week, Novell was showing glimpses of its
Linux Desktop, now expected to ship earlier than planned, by
year-end rather than in early 2005.
Novell has also announced a design change:
rather than creating their own graphical user interface, a
blend of the GNOME and KDE interfaces, they will offer users a
choice of either of these Linux standards.
The
prior SuSE Linux Desktop offering is likely to become a free
offering, rather like Red Hat’s Fedora, with the Novell Linux
Desktop becoming the standard business offering.
Novell
has also announced that it will use its existing patent portfolio to
protect its open source software offerings.
Essentially, Novell is rattling its IP sabers in the
direction of other IP owners who might threaten to sue the users of
open source software. It’s also enticing others with extensive
patent portfolios to do the same.
Full text of the announcement is at http://www.novell.com/company/policies/patent
.
SourceLabs Offers Infrastructure For Enterprise Applications
A
group of experienced BEA executives have joined to form SourceLabs,
a new company that will sell support and maintenance on a
subscription basis for integrated open source infrastructure.
They will create that infrastructure from existing open
source software that they select, integrate, and certify, including
such infrastructure applications as application servers, portals,
and databases.
This
would give customers another way of buying open source
infrastructure software – and ISVs another way of reaching the
marketplace.
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