7 Aug
2024
7 Aug
'24
10:56 p.m.
Theodore Ts'o wrote in
<20240807040644.GA4511(a)mit.edu>:
|On Tue, Aug 06, 2024 at 10:31:42AM -0700, Rik Farrow wrote:
|> I recall something different than what others had suggested. When the US
|> government issued requests for proposals, they weren't permitted \
|> to specify
|> products by name. In particular, if you wanted something that wasn't
|> Microsoft, you couldn't actually specify that it be Unix.
|
|That might have been *a* consideration, and that might have been a
|reason to take a pre-existing standard work and turn it into something
|official such as IEEE.
|
|There was a similar dynamic at work with the Linux Standard Base,
|which was originally an effort (which I was involved in), to create a
|ABI standard for Linux. The hope at the time was that this might make
|it easier for application vendors to make comercial software available
|that would work across multiple Linux distributions --- and in
|particular SuSE and Red Hat.
|
|This work went on for awhile, and we had developed an ABI standard
|that worked aross multiple architectures, including (but not limited
|to) x86/64, PowerPC, and S/390. At one point, in order to sell into
|certain government market (both the US and some European countries),
|there was a desire by certain major companies that we take the LSB to
|some Official Standards Body (the Free Standards Group, and which
|merged with OSDL to form the Linux Foundation wasn't good enough for
|government bureaucrats). So I was involved with various corporate
|strategists about which standards body would be easy enough to
|control; we considered IEEE, ECMA, and ISO. Ultimately the choice was
|ISO, and various big companies (including IBM and HP) sent their
|employees to various national standards bodies, and I got bunch of
|international trips to Europe and Asia, and after a year or two, the
|Linux Standard Base became ISO/IEC 23360.
|
|Of course, keeping an ISO standard up to date took a huge amount of
|effort and money, and over time, the requirement from government
|buyers that an OS came with an Internaional Standard went away --- and
|then my employer at the time, as well as the other major Linux
|companies, abandoned the effort completely.
|
|So while it may have been the case that at one point the US Government
|may have had a requirement, and the US Government may have looked down
|on plebian standards bodies like Uniforum and the Free Standards Body,
|and this might have inspired the $$$$ and effort to get an officially
|blessed International Standard, this was very likely *not* the reason
|why the stndard was written in the first place.
|
| - Ted
|
|P.S. For those of you who heard the controversy of how Microsoft
|manipulated the ISO process by stacking the deck with the employees at
|multiple countries' national bodies to influence the Office Open XML
|File Format (ISO/IEC 29500, previously known as ECMA-376), I can say
|quite authoratively that IBM and HP, as multinational, were not above
|doing something very similar with ISO/IEC 23360. The only difference
|was that it wasn't quite a high stakes, and it didn't result in
|appeals up to ISO/IEC JTC like what happened with ISO/IEC 29500.
|
|But as a result, I'm quite cynical about standards bodies which do
|voting by countries' national standards bodies, since I've seen how
|easy it is for multinationals to put fairly major thumbs on the scales
|to get a desired business outcome...
--End of <20240807040644.GA4511(a)mit.edu>
Btw how ridiculous is the view onto those Chinese Linux
Distributions which put effort in making Linux POSIX compatible,
and even pay money for making that official?
I personally was *tremendously*, well, pissed, once one of those
distributions was (just recently, ie, years later) not allowed to
join the encrypted part of oss-security.
Too much politics in a non-free world.
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
|
| Only during dog days:
| On the 81st anniversary of the Goebbel's Sportpalast speech
| von der Leyen gave an overlong hypocritical inauguration one.
| The brew's essence of our civilizing advancement seems o be:
| Total war - shortest war -> Permanent war - everlasting war