LSB appeared to lower the costs of support offered by Linux platforms by reducing the differences between various available Linux distributions. It also helps with costs for porting applications. Every time a developer writes an application, they need to make sure that the source code produced on one Linux distribution will also be able to be executed on other distributions as well. They would also like to make sure that this remains possible over the years.

The LSB workgroup is a Linux Foundation project that tries to address these exact problems. For this purpose, LSB workgroup started working on a standard that could describe a set of APIs that a Linux distribution should support. With the standards defined, the workgroup also moved a few steps further and developed a set of tools and tests to measure the support levels. With this done, they were able to define certain sets of compliance and also detect the certain differences between various distributions.

The LSB was...