Microsoft's recent embrace of Novell's SUSE Linux distribution, and Oracle's recent embrace of Red Hat Linux, raise the question anew: Can Linux avoid the fragmentation that crippled adoption of Unix? The Free Standards Group is dedicated to "safeguarding the future of Linux through standards." Jim Zemlin describes FSG's initiatives: the Linux Standard Base and related developer tools, testing and certification efforts. Zemlin also discusses the notion of binary compatibility and how it differs from the LSB mark, and explains the LSB Roadmap for improving application portability between Linux distributions. Zemlin also comments on prospects for continued Java standardization now that a GPL version of the Java language has been released by Sun Microsystems.
Jim Zemlin is executive director of the Free Standards Group. Zemlin previously served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leader in products and services for the Apache Web server. Prior to that, he was a member of the founding management team of Corio, a leading enterprise application service provider that had a successful initial public offering in July 2000. Widely quoted in the press on open source and commercial software trends, Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference, Linux World and OSCON. Zemlin also has a regular column in Enterprise Open Source Journal and is an advisor on open source strategy to various companies and governmental groups including Hyperic, Zmanda and the Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.
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