Recently, I wrote about the need for Linux operating system providers to expand the range of ready-to-install applications available for their distributions by pooling their software packaging efforts, perhaps with the help of Novell's OpenSUSE Build Service project.

I was pleased to learn that the Linux Foundation, an industry consortium aimed at fostering the growth of the platform, announced plans to pair up with Novell to deliver just such an offering. The service, which the group outlined at its recent Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, will be available through the foundation's Linux Developer Network, where it will aid in the creation of software packages for CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise and Ubuntu.

The Build Service should fit well with the Linux Foundation's other activities, in particular the development of the Linux Standard Base, a set of standards intended to ensure application binary compatibility across different Linux-based operating systems. The idea is that a stable ABI for Linux will save the platform from the incompatibility issues that challenged the family of Unix flavors during the heyday of that platform.

Through standards and compatibility testing tools, the LSB has worked behind the scenes to encourage a baseline of compatibility among Linux distributions for some time now, but significant gaps remain. For instance, papering over the differences between individual distributions' package management systems remains, for the most part, out of the LSB's scope. The LSB does mandate a particular package type, the RPM format used by Red Hat and Novell, but limits RPM to a subset of its capabilities that's known to work with Debian-based systems, through the package conversion application alien.

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