Solaris has another problem; relatively few ISV’s have ported to Solaris on Opteron, but Solaris has many, many more ISV’s shipping products on its highly expensive, Sparc platform. ABI compatibility on the Intel platform with Linux could threaten long-term ISV commitment to the Solaris platform, and at the very least would make it easier for customers to transition from Solaris to Linux, and for more ISV’s to support Linux, which is not in Sun’s long-term interest. Whether it is for these or other reasons, Sun has never been particularly interested in the LSB, and I don’t see any likelihood of that changing. Of course, if Solaris wants create a Linux compatibility layer and then try to get it certified as an LSB-compliant environment, it is welcome to do that.

At the end of the day, I think what this article is missing is that in order for a standard to be useful, it has to define a platform which applications can target, and ship binaries that will Just Work. Posix never met that goal because (a) it was a source standard, and (b) in order to be as applicable as possible to a wide range of OS’s, it watered itself down by allowing multiple different behaviors so that no Unix flavors would “lose out”. But by being broad, it became much, much less useful to application programs, who still needed to make their applications flexible enough to support the Solaris way of doing Posix, the AIX way of implementing Posix, the Digital Unix way of implementing Posix, etc., etc. So the LSB is standardizing the Linux way of doing things. Period. That makes it much more useful than if it did the politically correct thing by saying, “Well, we like the FreeBSD and Solaris ways of doing things too; they’re OK by us!” It’s politically correct, but not very useful as a run-time ABI standard. So instead, we take a different tack: the FreeBSD and Solaris ways of doing things are just fine, but if they want to run Linux application binary from Oracle or SAP, they need to provide a compatibility layer which is LSB compliant. We’ll tell Sun and FreeBSD what they need to provide in that compatibility layer, but we’re not going to force the application to simultaneously be able to call out to via either the Linux system call interface or the Solaris system call interface. Because, you know, that would be crazy.

[Update (2007 Jan 25, 20:35): Stephen O'Grady and I are generally complementary in our thinking, but more aligned. Here's his excellent analysis. I think I'm showing my age.] Monday saw the announcement of the creation of the Linux Foundation by…