Re: WDSC for Linux... -- WDSCI-L


Scott,

I think your Ubuntu observations are on the money. And if IBM were tosupport any linux distro it would probably have to be SuSE because of the

heavy political and capital investments already made by IBM.

And, as far as Red Hat goes, who knows, Larry Ellison may decide to make ita totally owned subsidiary of Oracle in the near future...which wouldreally be interesting!

Then IBM also has to make the decisions which distro's to support as NOBODYcodes to the vanilla linux definitions, they code to a distro and as we allknow there's compatibility issues between distros...


Don in DC



At 02:01 PM 11/1/2006 -0600, you wrote:

> Here's an alternative: IBM could just choose one distro to support - say
> Red Hat.

Hmmm... I'd say RedHet is a poor choice.  Many years ago, it was popular.
Then RedHat split into an open source version called Fedora and a
commercial (for pay)  version that's still called RedHat.  Now you don't
see too many people running RedHat anymore.  A lot switched to Fedora, and
I suspect a lot of Fedora users have switched to Ubuntu, since ease of use
was the reason they used RedHat to begin with, and Ubuntu surpassed them
in that respect.

However, that's just my impression -- I haven't done any actual research
to come to that conclusion.

If IBM wants to pick just one to support, I'd think Ubuntu would be the
first choice.  Or maybe Debian.

But that would only help with i386 versions of Linux (and not Alpha or
PowerPC, etc). And it wouldn't provide any solutions for MacOS or FreeBSD
users... or various other unix-like operating systems.


> Even better, if IBM could manage to confine dependancies to libraries
> included in the Linux Standard Base, they would be able to support myriad
> distros in one shot.  I guess FreeBSD might get left out in this case -
> does BSD have something like the LSB?

FreeBSD is an entire distribution, it's not just a kernel like Linux is.
The base tools that come with the operating system are developed, tested
and supported by the same team of people who develop the kernel, and it's
all distributed as an operating system. Consequently, there's no LSB. If
you say you support FreeBSD, then it's implied that you're using the tools
that come with it. :)

Linux on the other hand is just a kernel developed by a team of people.
Then a separate team (Fedora, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, etc)
combines it with the basic tools to make a dsitribution.  It's a different
paradigm.

The other BSDs (OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, MacOS, etc) have a separate
team of people, maintaining a separate kernel and separate userland tools.
This is very different from Linux where the same kernel is used in
different distros. Although the other BSDs may have used code from FreeBSD
or one of it's ancestors when they first started out, they're no using the
same codebase.  Though, they do share ideas between them...  for example,
if there's a new network card released, and NetBSD has drivers for it,
then the FreeBSD guys might take their code (possibly with modifications)
and include it in FreeBSD -- one the advantages of open source!

Anyway...  they're all very similar.  In almost all cases, a simple
re-compile of the Linux sources will work on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
etc.  There might be a little difference here or there that you have to
account for, but they're few and far between.  If IBM provided the source
for WDSC and made it work on Linux, I'd happily make and maintain my own
patches to let it work on FreeBSD.

But this is all moot since I doubt they'd ever provide the source for
WDSC.  That leaves me with a Linux binary and running it under some sort
of emulation.
--

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