[TUHS] Other POSIX Candidates?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Theodore Ts'o wrote in
 <20240807040644.GA4511 at 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 at 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