Statement from the FSG Board of Directors

The FSG Board of Directors recommends that the Linux Standard Base (LSB) workgroup create an "LSB Futures Technical Subcommittee". This subcommittee will addresses community requirements to extended the LSB standard. Up until this point the LSB focused on "Completeness" over "Scope". Adding an Futures subcommittee will allow the LSB working group to extend scope as well.

The LSB Futures group will do the following things;

• Create and maintain a list of criteria for evaluating and categorizing potential candidates.
• Gather and publish a list of potential candidates based on input from the development community and by analysing the existing body of Linux software. This list will be dynamic and reflect the status of candidates at any given time.
• For each candidate identified for recommendation to the LSB, the LSB
  Futures group is to:
  • Assign a candidate number.
  • Investigate the proposal (ie., upstream author, licensing, within scope of the LSB mission)
  • Auto-build the candidate specifications.
  • Publish the candidate on the world wide web.
  • Categorize the status of the candidate (ie., submission, investigation, definition, validation, proposal (aka, phase 1, phase 2, phase 3, ...).
  • Present the candidate's definition, validation, and sample to the LSB for inclusion.
• Will not outline or provide a "reference" implementation (that is, specification by software version number), but rather an unambiguous set of candidate specifications.
• Follow a fast track process to build an ABI definition and validation.
  • Use and enhance the LSB tools to quickly parse and data mine API/ABI information to be modeled in the LSB database.
  • Use the LSB database to define an (API/ABI) interface set.
  • Use the LSB database to extract API/ABI information to create header files and validation suites.