Does anyone care about LSB on arm?

[Jeremiah Foster]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 1:25 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
<lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Wookey <wookey at 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