Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 15:17:38 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Has the foretold fragmentation of Linux begun? Message-ID: <3D616E82.FC89DA05@mindspring.com> References: <20020819155109.GC89852@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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Jonathon McKitrick wrote: > I think it's interesting that we have Red Hat, United Linux (with the > LSB stamp?), and now Sun rolling their own. > > It seems that this was part of the plan all along of these big > corporations, and this could lead to the exact same kind of > fragmentation that brought down Unix in the first place. > > Will the GPL help, hinder, or be irrelevant to prevent this? > > NOTE: Please CC me, as I am not currently subscribed. Thanks. The LSB is a joke. It does not guarantee binary compatability, or the ability to run a program compiled on one vendor's Linux release on another vendor's Linux release. This is exactly the problem that faced UNIX during "The UNIX Wars", and was never resolved. The problem is that vendor extensions *cannot be turned off* by developers. Even if they could be, they won't be turned off by users, so there's no guarantee against collisions (e.g. "foofunc", if implemented by a developer because it was outside the standard, but defined and used internally by a vendor for the implementation of other functions that *are* defined by the standard means that the developer version would breaks some standards mandated functions on a particular platform, even though it's technically compliant). There is an inherent tension between the desire to claim to be standard compliant with any given standard, and the desire to lock developers into a particular developement version, and thereby, lock users into the same version. It is most often resolved on the side of lock-in. It's an economic version of "The Prisoner's Dilemma", and the basis is that there is no equalibrium point where all vendors agree to not fight border wars: doing so would be to accept the commoditization of their product. If that happens, what will differentiate "RedHat" from "Debian" from "SuSE", etc.? The answer is "nothing: that what a commodity *is*". I think that, in a minor way, the GPL will promote factionalization, since it will promote entry into the market, and there will be no release-delay or other barriers that can be thrown up, apart from the implementation of yet more vendor extensions. We've already seen this in the non-cooperation in the packaging formats between distributions, and we've seen "United Linux" attempt a USL-style "reconciliation", where there is one source base that is licensed to multiple seperate vendors (for the reasons above, United Linux is also a joke). Actually, I'd also like to address an assumption you've made, and I think it's not entirely correct: what "brought down UNIX" was the unwillingness of the UNIX vendors to compete against Microsoft directly. That's factionalization, not fragmentation. The fragmentation was unrelated. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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