Santa Clara, Calif. — (press release) — The Linux Standard Base (LSB) and Linux Internationalization Initiative (LI18NUX) announced today that they have incorporated under the name Free Standards Group. The newly formed Free Standards Group was organized to accelerate the use and acceptance of open source technologies through the application, development and promotion of interoperability standards for… open source development.

The Free Standards Group has received endorsements from a growing number of industry corporations as well as from public interest groups such as the Debian Project. These milestones move the group significantly closer to its goal of creating a single Linux standard.

The Free Standards Group will draw upon its LSB and LI18NUX roots to ensure that the Linux operating system does not fall victim to fragmentation, breaking into multiple versions, each of which is supported by only selected applications. To prevent that, the Free Standards Group's members are promoting a specification, which, when implemented, will mean that any LSB-compliant application will run successfully on any LSB-compliant Linux distributions. While sensitive to the idea that Linux development should not be stifled, the group is working to define a common subset of Linux that will work for everyone, regardless of distribution.

With its incorporation and its commitment from key players in the industry, the Free Standards Group will be able to place additional resources behind the LSB and LI18NUX.

“The Free Standards Group's efforts will be an important component of the continued success of open source,” said Linus Torvalds, Linux creator. “Standards such as the LSB and Li18nux help bring different companies and groups together to solve common problems and will help to advance Linux in a good way.”

Daniel Quinlan, chair of the standards group commented, “Our progress over the last few months has been significant. Key companies and organizations are lining up behind us and the resources and funding we need to achieve our goals are coming in place. We have everythin we need to move forward quickly in increasing compatibility among Linux and other open source distributions and in helping to support software vendors and developers to port and write software for open source such as Linux.”

Members of the Free Standards Group's list of supporters include:

Atipa Linux Solutions
Caldera Systems
Corel Corporation
The Debian Project
Delix Computer
Enhanced Software Technologies, Inc.
IBM
Linuxcare
Linux for Power PC
Linuxmall.com
Linux Professional Institute
Metro Link
Open Group
Red Hat, Inc.
SAP AG
SCO
SGI
Software in the Public Interest, Inc.
Sun Microsystems
SuSE Linux AG
TurboLinux
VA Linux Systems

Te Free Standards Group is a nonprofit corporation organized to accelerate the use and acceptance of open source technologies through the application, development and promotion of interoperability standards. It encompasses the Linux Standard Base (www.linuxbase.org) and the Linux Internationalization Initiative (www.li18nux.org).

The Linux Standard Base was formed in 1998 to develop and promote a set of standards that will increase compatibility among Linux distriubtions and enable software applications to run on any compliant Linux system.

The Linux Internationalization Initiative is focused on software and application portability and interoperability in the International context.

To learn more about the Free Standards Group, visit the group's web site at www.freestandards.org.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.