[TUHS] Re: Other POSIX Candidates?

On Tue, Aug 06, 2024 at 10:31:42AM -0700, Rik Farrow wrote: 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...