Aharon - is this article you were referring: POSIX Has Become Outdated: Atlidakis, Andrus & Geambasu

I have it and have read it. It is a great piece and I think spot on for new(er) applications being written fresh for Mac OSx, Android, etc.

I'm personally poking at this from the large (clustered) view of a commercial ISV (think in Geo Sciences, Mech E CAD, Fluids, Chem, or Financial) that has valuable code (much still in Fortran BTW). More over their customers have huge amounts of data developed over 30-40 years using those codes, so if you magically tried to replace the codes, you need to revalidate the data too.

So how do your define/agree upon/build interfaces that that ISV can trust and an IHV/OEM can use to sell systems, particularly for the commercial part of the market. The very high end (national labs/high energy physics types) write their own code. But the main part of the commercial scientific community does not.

POSIX.1 and LSB certainly helped to solve a set of problems. But it seems like the developers of the systems don't care any more. They have a use my 'framework' and my app store mentality. Which sort of is working for mass market where you sell millions of copies.

The problem is that those codes were all developed when an older market model and market model has changed as the market great to include a new group of players. The problem is that the market does not care much for that older portion of the total market these days, so their model is squeezed. But as I said, even if magically new codes appeared to replace the old ones, the old data is still an issue.

Clem

On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 6:28 AM, <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

There was an article about this in ;login: in 2015 if I recall
correctly. Worth trying to find. The issue is a real one.

HTH,

Arnold

Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
> What do you folks think?
>
> Clem