Bruce Perens on the new Debian Common Core

On Tuesday, August 9, 2005, many of the major Debian-derivative GNU/Linux distros banded together to create the Debian Common Core Alliance. Essentially, the DCCA is a group of Debian heavy-weights who got tired of reinventing each others' efforts, and decided to implement the Linux Standards Base in a set of binary packages that will be common to their distros. The benefits are obvious. Applications designed to work on one distro will work on another. The Alliance members will save bunches of money on not duplicating each others' work. Customers of the DCCA members will have the option of getting support for DCC code from a broader array of vendors. And perhaps most importantly, it now becomes just that much harder for Steve Ballmer to whine about an absence of a "center of gravity" in GNU/Linux distros.