"I have had the feeling that Linux has been teetering on the brink of the same problem that beset UNIX last century, when several proprietary flavours of UNIX evolved, making development, portability and interoperability a real pain."
Linux can't become proprietary, the GPL blocks this absolutely. Dell cannot produce a proprietary Linux. What they MAY do is release binary (non-open-source drivers) to optimise Linux on their hardware. These would be unacceptable to hard-line open-sourcers but of little consequence to Joe User. They might also tweak the kernel to better cooperate with their drivers, but under the GPL any changes would have to be released as source code. The big Linux houses usually tweak the kernel to work better with their releases and this is perfectly legit so long as the changes are freely released and documented.
The sort of proprietisation that nearly killed UNIX just can't happen.
By its very nature GNU/Linux is a do-your-own-thing animal, but most coders/vendors are coming, often reluctantly, to the realisation that working towards a fixed set of Linux standards is the only way to go.
The Linux Foundation set up the Linux Standard Base organisation -
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/LSB - to encourage vendors to follow their guidelines.
"The Linux Standard Base delivers interoperability between applications and the Linux operating system. Currently all major distributions comply with the LSB and many major application vendors, like MySQL, RealNetworks and SAP, are certifying. The LSB offers a cost-effective way for application vendors to target multiple Linux distributions while building only one software package. For end-users, the LSB and its mark of interoperability preserves choice by allowing them to select the applications and distributions they want while avoiding vendor lock-in. LSB certification of distributions results in more applications being ported to Linux and ensures that distribution vendors are compatible with those applications. In short, the LSB ensures Linux does not fragment."
Actually mainstream Linux is quite rapidly evolving towards these standards.
Mac
