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Too Much Linux Isn't Such A Bad Thing

By Jason Levitt

Do you think there are too many versions of Unix out there? Maybe you think there are too many versions of the Windows operating systems? Well, forget about those wimpy operating systems. Welcome to the 150th version of the Linux operating system (No one knows exactly how many Linux distributions there are, but the last estimate I heard was 140, so I'll pick 150 since it's nice and even). Yes, there are only 149 other versions of the Linux operating system that you can choose besides mine. But why not mine? I created JABBER (JAson's Big Bad ERudite) Linux 1.0 in a fit of pique last week, because there wasn't a version of Linux out there with my name all over the source code. I also created it because I can--because "anyone" can. This is part of the beauty of open source. You download the source code to a Linux distribution you like, modify it a bit, recompile it, and presto, you have your own version of Linux.

The downside for businesses that want to use Linux is that they have to choose which Linux to deploy in their enterprise. If you've shopped around for specific applications to run on Linux, you'll quickly see that they only install and run properly on a small fraction of the Linux versions out there. In Europe, SuSe Linux is the dominant version by far, but in the U.S., specific versions of Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, Mandrake, and Caldera Linux are often supported. Some Linux applications can get by with merely the presence of a specific version of glibc, the C library that contains the primary system calls used by Linux applications, but other Linux applications depend on the presence of certain system utilities, installation applications, or other features.

None of this is news to the Linux community, but their answer, the Linux Standard Base, "a set of standards that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable software applications to run on any compliant Linux system," is an ambitious, committee-driven project, that's been slow to evolve. In the meantime, the Free Standards Group, "a non-profit corporation organized to accelerate the use and acceptance of open source technologies through the application, development, and promotion of standards," has incorporated and taken over the Linux Standard Base project as well as fast-tracking a simple specification called the Linux Development Platform Specification, which lists the software packages (kernel, glibc, Xfree86, GCC, etc.) that conforming Linux platforms need to include. The Linux Development Platform Specification by no means guarantees applications will install and run on a conforming Linux operating system, but it increases the chances that they could be tweaked to work. In short, it's better than nothing while we wait for the Linux Standard Base.

Writing standards specifications isn't nearly as fun as developing software, but standards are necessary at this stage of the Linux game to make sure that software development isn't always an exercise in innovation at the expense of usability. However, it's also important to stay focused with standards and keep corporate politics out of the standards-making process as much as possible. One only needs to browse the Open Group's web site, www.opengroup.org, to see what a mess standards specifications can become. The Open Group, formed in 1996, essentially inherited a decade of corporate infighting among the major Unix vendors: Sun, IBM, SGI, HP, SCO, and DEC subsuming the standards interests of X/Open, the Open Software Foundation, /usr/group, and Unix International in the process. Today, the Open Group, which owns the trademark "Unix", helps create conformance test suites (they're even helping with the Linux Standard Base) and enforce the Unix trademark, as well as promoting their own standards trademarks.

Trademarks are the key to branding, and Linux is no exception. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, owns the Linux trademark but he's provided no guidelines for its usage. One assumes that you merely have to have a Linux-derived kernel in order to call your operating system Linux. It's unclear what would happen if someone distributed an operating system that's not based on the Linux kernel and decided to call it Linux. No doubt, Linus would call on the great weight of the open source developer community to force that unfortunate developer to cease and desist. The situation with the Unix trademark, in contrast, has been spelled out for two decades or so. While you originally had to purchase licensed code from AT&T and sign lots of legal documents in order to use the word "Unix" after your OS name, any operating system can now be called Unix if it passes the large battery of conformance tests that the Open Group administers. There are strict guidelines for the use of the Unix Trademark, however, and I've broken one of them in this article because the usage guidelines clearly state that Unix "must not be used as a generic term."

(I still get E-mail from disgruntled readers who think that "Unix" is a noun that can describe any operating system that reminds them of those operating systems they used to use back in the early 1990's. Thus, they get mad when I use the term "unixlike" to describe, say, FreeBSD, when, in fact, it would be technically illegal for me to call it Unix).

Will any operating system that passes the various Linux Standard Base conformance tests get to call itself Linux? I'm not sure anyone will care after the first 40 versions of Linux pass it, but it will be interesting to see if the Linux Standard Base really levels the application portability playing field or if, say, features of various Linux installation managers and GUIs still force application developers to make sure their applications run correctly on each version of Linux whether it's Linux Standard Base conformant or not.

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