by Ian Murdock

I’ve been rather quiet lately, but that’s because I’ve been busy helping put the finishing touches on LSB 3.1, which was released [ http://www.freestandards.org/wordpress/?p=174 ] early last week. New in LSB 3.1 are the integration of the ISO standard LSB Core (ISO/IEC 23360) and the addition of the LSB Desktop platform above the core (which stops at the desktop toolkits in 3.1, i.e., GTK and Qt, but that will move up the stack to encompass more of GNOME and KDE in 3.2 and 4.0). LSB 3.1 also lays a solid foundation on which to build LSB 3.2 and 4.0. Key milestones here include alignment of the LSB roadmap with the roadmaps of the major Linux distros and more direct participation of the key stakeholders in the standard (distro vendors, ISVs, and upstream project maintainers). Much, much more to come on these points as soon as I’m fully recharged.

In the meantime, I’m pleased to report we had a very successful launch last week. The release was supported by a who’s who of the Linux industry: Dell, HP, IBM, Linspire, Novell, RealNetworks, Red Flag, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and others [ http://www.freestandards.org/wordpress/?p=173 ]. Importantly, no fewer than ten major Linux distributions have committed to LSB 3.1 certification, including upcoming versions of Asianux, Linspire, Mandriva, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Enterprise Desktop, Sun Wah Linux, Turbolinux, Ubuntu, and Xandros. In short, if you’re an application developer, and you want to easily target all of the major Linux distributions, LSB 3.1 is a great way to do it.

More details here: BusinessWeek (and dozens of others via the Associated Press, including ABC News, the Boston Herald, Forbes, FOX News, MSNBC, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News), eWEEK, InformationWeek, InfoWorld (and others via the IDG News Service), Slashdot (twice, here and here), and many other places.

8:27am

Copyright 2006