Free Standards group stabilises Linux for nervous businessmen

John Paczkowski, writing in today’s Good Morning Silicon Valley, says:

“In October of 2000, Microsoft ran what would be the first of many anti-Linux advertisements, one that, unlike the others that would follow it, was not only uncharacteristically witty, but rooted in the fears of the Open Source community, and not some alternate reality conjured up in a company sponsored study. Published in a German magazine, the ad featured a lineup of four penguins – the first a normal penguin, the second a penguin with rabbit ears, the third a penguin with a frog’s head and antlers, and the last a penguin with the ears of a pig and an elephant’s trunk. Microsoft’s point: Linux is forking in the same disastrous way that Unix did. Some day, there will many separate and incompatible versions of the OS and God help you if you’ve chosen to build a business on one of them. Nearly four years have passed since that ad first appeared and Linux has not forked in the way that Microsoft predicted. And after today, it probably never will. The Free Standards Group is expected to announce today that a consortium of companies — among them IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, AMD, Red Hat and Novell — has agreed to support Linux Standard Base 2.0, a specification designed to assure compatibility between Linux distributions. It’s a landmark agreement and one that could do much to solidify Linux’s role as a desktop option. Said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Free Standards Group: “If the Linux industry can unite and pull this off, there’s a real shot at a true open alternative to Microsoft. … As with any standard you must reach a certain critical mass to gain recognition. We’ve gained total support from the world’s Linux software makers and having these other vendors come lend their support goes a long way.”