“By releasing the Portland Beta, we’re giving ISVs the opportunity to closely examine and test the interface capabilities and give us feedback that will result in a highly stable Portland 1.0,” said John Cherry, OSDL initiative manager. “This kind of review and input will motivate Linux distros and others to include the final programming interfaces in their offerings as early as September.”

The Portland Project was established in December 2005 to improve interoperability issues for ISVs whose applications must work regardless of Linux distributor, desktop environment or version This effort is expected to give way to increasing adoption of Linux on the desktop and open source applications for the office.

“The latest release of the Linux Standard Base 3.1 helps ISVs to support many different Linux distributions with little effort, said Waldo Bastian, Portland project leader at freedesktop.org. “The Portland Project expands on that by enabling ISVs to easily integrate their applications with the major Linux desktop environments without the need to target one in particular. Together, these efforts allow ISVs to target the Linux desktop as a single platform and maximize the return on their Linux investment.”