"The No. 1 thing that we need on Linux is applications," he said. "Whether we like it or not, the application is what drives the final customer decision," he added.

He said that Linux will have trouble growing quickly enough as long as independent software vendors (ISVs) need to customize applications for all the distributions out there. "If you look at Windows , their application availability is far and away their biggest advantage," he said. "ISVs go to Microsoft and they know there is one platform ."

Linux, by comparison, is distributed by many vendors in many flavors. "Our current process on certifying our ISVs is really an individual distribution by distribution." Hovsepian called for the Linux community to address fragmentation by standardizing at the application programming interface (API) level and by standardizing ISV certification.

Linux's Biggest Challenge

"Today I am asking the open-source vendor community to support a vendor-neutral effort to standardize ISV certifications," he said. "The ISVs would be able to certify an application and seamlessly port it across Linux distributions."

Just how would the standardization be developed? "We need to leverage the bodies that exist already," Hovsepian said. "We don't need to create new ones, but we need to take advantage of what the Linux Standard Base has already created."

Applications "are and have been one of the biggest challenges for Linux," said Al Gillen, research vice president of system software for IDC. To grow the operating system, the Linux community must "lower the bar of complexity" for ISVs, he said.

Because of the burden of supporting numerous distributions, the average ISV releases software on only three or four distributions, Gillen explained. "The goal is to have ISVs have access to all the distributions," he said, noting that doing so will mean "complete agreement on a minimum set of APIs." (continued...)

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