On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 1:25 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Wookey wookey@wookware.org wrote:
In my experience anyone distributing binaries actually picks a small set of distros and builds for those explicitly, rather than relying on the LSB. Does that mean that it's not actually useful in the real world? I guess in a sense this posting is to the wrong lists; we're all free software people here who have little use for the LSB. Where do the proprietary software distributors hang out :-)
They are starting to hang out in all the familiar Free Software places. :-)
sooo... although the situation *right now* is that nobody in the commercial world is the slightest bit interested in LSB because they all do "custom builds" of complete software stacks, it could be said that *if* the free software community just dropped ready-to-go LSB standards in front of their noses, they'd quite likely use it.
Circumspect and balanced as always Mr. Leighton. :)
I've been to the "commercial world" on a temporary visa and they do in fact care about things like standards. In fact I would go so far as to say that this LSB proposal for ARM would significantly improve life for consortia like GENIVI which has members from the ARM and Intel camp.
you have to remember that the majority of these companies could not put two lines of code together to save their lives. they literally have to be spoon-fed (in some cases even to the point of being told where to put the screws, let alone the software). they are usually spoon-fed by the CPU manufacturer [and in the case of MStar Semi, they won't even let *you* violate the GPL, they do it entirely for you].
so in that regard, i think it's more a case of "if the free software community provides LSB across ARM, it'll get used".
I agree.
so in _that_ regard, the question becomes: "are the efforts of the free software community better off being spent elsewhere"? and "what benefit is there *TO THE FREE SOFTWARE COMMUNITY* of doing LSB for ARM"? forget the proprietary junkies, they'll suck anything from us that moves and not give a dime in return.
In my experience there are dimes to be had, you just have to ask nicely.
Regards,
Jeremiah