I've send a couple of you private messages with some more details of why I ask this, but I'll bring the large question to debate here:
Have POSIX and
LSB lost their
usefulness/relevance? If so, we know ISV’s like Ansys are not going to go ‘FOSS’ and make their sources available (ignore religious beliefs, it just is not their business model); how to we get that level of precision to allow the part of the
market that will be 'binary only' continue to
create applications?
Seriously, please try to stay away from religion on this
question. Clearly, there are a large number of ISVs have traditionally used interface specifications. To me it started with things like the old Cobol and Fortran standards for the languages. That was not good enough since the systems diverge, and /usr/group then IEEE/ANSI/ISO did Posix.
Clearly, Posix enabled Unix implementations such a Linux to shine, although Linux does not doggedly follow it. Apple was once Posix conformant, but I'd not think they worry to much about it. Linux created LSB, but I see fewer and fewer references to it.
I worry that without a real binary definition, it's darned hard (at least in the higher end of the business that I live day-to-day) to get ISV's to care.