amcpherson's blog

The Chinese government has been supporting the LSB and mandating its use by Linux distribution vendors. In this ZDNet article, a government officials talks about Linux use in China and the inclusion of the LSB.

For those of you into podcasts, here’s one with Ian Murdock, CTO of the Free Standards Group, from the floor of Linux World Boston. It’s episode 134.

The FSG will have a very strong presence at Linux World in Boston this week. Please come by our booth at the .org pavilion or attend one of these sessions.

B6: Why Open Standards Are Crucial to Protecting Your Linux Investment 04/05/2006, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM

Speaker: Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, Free Standards Group.

Jonathan Schwartz has frequently beaten the open standards drum, but this post is an especially good one. While he’s singing the praises of the ODF (big surprise), his points on open standards and the interoperability they deliver are relevant to the LSB and other open source standards. He says:

Andrew Kantor makes excellent points about standards and their positive impact on innovation and competition in this article in USA Today, including the following:

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe makes a good point about the Linux desktop and vendor lock in in this article in eWeek.

Jaffe added that it is interesting that for many years now the number one mantra for CIOs was avoiding vendor lock-in, which had driven things like standards and Posix.

“It is very interesting that there is this one part of the industry where that has not quite happened. But I think deep inside their DNA they do not want vendor lock-in,” Jaffe said.

Another article from this week’s OSBC conference. Infoweek covers Nick Carr’s speech on open source and how it is already transforming IT into a more centralized utility. While the topic certainly isn’t new (everyone from ASPs to utility or autonomic computing vendors have been sprouting the same messages for years), his points that open source is the enabling technology behind this revolution are interesting.

Interesting article on how usability and availability of applications are crucial for improving the Linux desktop and its chances of wide-spread success. It includes the FSG’s Linux desktop project.

For those of you who are interested in the benefits of application certification to the LSB, we have a new resource to check out. This real player file will replay a recent webinar where FSG executive director Jim Zemlin and Lymeware CTO Michael Kabor discussed Michael’s recent experience certifying to the LSB.

Please let us know if you have comments or feedback.

We are happy to report that rising commercial open source applications company SugarCRM has joined the FSG. They are the talk of OSBC, currently taking place here in San Francisco. You can read the details, such as they are, in the press release on freestandards.org.