February 5th, 2005
The fork in Linux' road
Today Matt Broersma at ZDNet UK offers some real wisdom on how the Free Standards Group (FSG) is fighting Microsoft’s latest charge against Linux, the possibility of forking.
The Microsoft charge that Linux "has the potential to fragment like Unix did" resonates with many enterprise customers. The response is the Linux Standard Base. Version 2.0 went out last September, and a group called the Linux Core Consortium (Conectiva, Mandrakesoft, Progeny, and Turbolinux)are engineering a binary of 2.0they all plan to commit to.
If application developers get behind the LSB, then Linux becomes a common platform, the FSG says. If they don’t, you might just stick a fork in open source — it will be done.
That’s what they think, anyway. What do you think? Personally I would like to see IBM and a few other giants in the LCC. But you can let me have it for that in TalkBack. In fact I invite you to.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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