Areas in which the Linux Standard Base Benefits Us

The following items are examples of areas in which adoption of the LSB would allow for the elimination of various compatibility layers that are currently necessary in our product.

• Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) - Standard filesystem locations would eliminate the need for pathname abstraction mechanisms.
• Standardisation of Init Systems - Standard run level definitions, as well as standard startup script locations, actions, and expected behaviours would reduce the need for an init abstraction layer.
• Standardised Packaging Mechanism - The LSB recommends that the Red Hat Package Manager (rpm) be available. This would allow application vendors to provide a single package format that would install on any Linux distribution.

In addition to the above direct benefits, there are also a few indirect benefits of the LSB.

Dealing with bugs and feature changes in external software is generally a challenging task. (With open source, the detection and solution of external bugs is less difficult, but still a problem, nonetheless). Adherence to the LSB ensures that some degree of backward compatibility is maintained for those interfaces defined by the standard. Also, the test suite for the Linux Standard Base is an additional tool to help reduce the introduction of bugs (and other incompatibilities) to system interfaces.