From:	 Scott McNeil <mcneil@freestandards.org>
To:	 corbet@lwn.net
Subject: LSB Written Specification 1.0
Date:	 Mon, 02 Jul 2001 15:26:48 -0700

The Free Standards Group releases LSB Written Specification 1.0
Specification released as promised at LinuxWorld NY 

On Friday, June 29, the The Free Standards Group released LSB Written
Specification 1.0, a major milestone in the standardization of the
free and open source Linux operating system.

Consisting of approximately 400 pages of behavioral specifications for
the Linux operating system, the Written Specification was released
exactly on schedule as promised by the Free Standards Group at the
January, 2001 LinuxWorld in New York City.

"Developers of Linux based software now have a Rosetta Stone."
said George Kraft, LSB Work Group Chair, "By building applications to
the specification and then testing using the LSB test suites,
developers are assured that their work will run on any LSB conforming
Linux distribution,"

Along with the release of the LSB Written Specification 1.0 the Group
has released the beta version of its test suites for Linux
distributions and Linux based applications.

"There are three elements of every standard that the Free Standards
Group produces," said Dan Quinlan, Free Standards Group Chair, "a
clearly written guide, a test suite and a sample implementation. With
this comprehensive suite of tools and documentation, developers will
be able to spend more time enhancing their software rather than
verifying on the many versions of Linux."

The LSB Written Specification 1.0 was created through the efforts of
the free and open source development community, Linux distribution s
such as  Caldera, Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE and Turbolinux, and
the greater Linux industry.

"Even though version 1.0 of the Written Specification has just been
released, several Linux distributions are very, very close to
conformance." said Start Anderson, principal author of the LSB Written
Specification, "This is because of the Linux distribution companies
continued participation in the development of the Standard and the
associated test suites."

The LSB Written Specification 1.0 is available for free download from
http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/ The beta versions of the LSB test
suites are freely available from
ftp://lsb.sourceforge.net/pub/lsb/lsbdev

Scott
--
Scott McNeil
Free Standards Group
www.freestandards.org
510.687.6777
408.621.7048