InformationWeek: Achilles' Heel: Linux Libraries

"As Vendors Scramble To Port Business Applications To Linux, The Lack Of A Standard Set Of Features For The Open-Source Operating System Is Causing Headaches And User Uncertainty. The Forthcoming Linux Standard Base May Be The Solution."

"With the spate of major IT business platforms released for Linux the past six months, more IT managers are tempted to use Linux to save money."

"But these managers are finding that, despite the ease with which the word Linux is tossed about, there are at least 15 English-language distributions of the operating system for the Intel platform-and none of them are exactly alike. Though they are similar, since they each start with some version of the same freely available source-code base, the differences are such that there is no guarantee that your commercial Linux application will run on all of them. Vendors porting commercial applications to Linux are finding that the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) differences in Linux distributions can cause problems for customers and developers."

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