Last week, the Free Standards Group launched the LSB Developer Network, a community resource for developers building portable Linux applications via the LSB (read the press release and the introduction from LDN editor Martin Streicher).

The LSB Developer Network (or LDN for short) aims to provide a well known starting point for developers looking to target the variety of Linux distributions available today without requiring a separate version for each distribution. It is the perfect complement to the LSB, which already provides a “highest common denominator” across the major distributions; and LSB Certification, which allows ISVs to indicate that their products will work with LSB Certified distributions.

The big themes of LDN are “decentralized” and “bottom up”—to paraphrase Darrin Thompson, it’s a developer network that’s actually a network. In other words, we’re not taking the usual path of hiring a bunch of people to construct a centralized “network” from the top down—after all, Linux is a fundamentally decentralized phenomenon so shouldn’t a developer network for Linux be decentralized as well?

Like the LSB, we see LDN as essential to the ultimate success of the Linux platform, an answer to similar programs for the centralized, proprietary platforms Linux competes with but built using the very techniques that make Linux what it is. Our fundamental belief is that “decentralized” doesn’t have to mean “fragmented”, and LSB and LDN are both key steps toward that end goal.

We’re off to a good start too: LDN has the backing of a broad range of Linux platform stakeholders ranging from distribution vendors (Novell, Red Hat, Ubuntu) to OEMs (HP, IBM) and ISVs (MySQL, RealNetworks) to tools and content providers (O’Reilly, SlickEdit). One upcoming feature I’m particularly excited about is the integration of Safari Books Online. Soon, you’ll be able to type, for example, a function name into the LDN search box and get not just results from the link directory but also results from O’Reilly titles and others you know and love.

We’re moving rapidly to add community content as well, including man pages and canonical reference documentation; and we’ll be hooking LDN into the LSB database, so you’ll be able to query the status of interfaces too, including whether or not those interfaces are in the LSB and what their status is in each of the major Linux distributions, to help make your applications as portable as possible.

If you’re a Linux developer, and particularly if you use del.icio.us to bookmark resources on the web related to software development on Linux, I urge you to contribute to the LSB Developer Network. It’s easy: Simply create an account and link your account to your del.icio.us account (you don’t need to provide your del.icio.us password, just your username), and as you bookmark, tag, and annotate pages, your bookmarks, tags, and annotations will be pulled into the LDN directory. Help us build a developer network for Linux, bottom-up style!