Building a Linux Certification Program

Some time ago, the idea for a certification program for Linux existed only in the minds and discussions of individuals and small groups of people in different locations and all working separately. Over the past year, many of these separate people have come together in a community-based effort to define a Linux certification program. Who is this group? How did they come together? What have they accomplished to date?

We call ourselves the Linux Professional Institute (LPI). As stated on our web site (http://www.lpi.org/), our mission statement is:

With these words, we put in writing our overall goal, a remarkable initiative that emerged from mailing list discussions over much of the past year. In this article, I will discuss how the initiative evolved, what our current plans are, and how you can become involved.

One part of our effort began with an article I wrote for the October 1998 issue of Linux Gazette (www.linuxgazette.com/issue33/york.html). In that article, I outlined the reasons I felt a certification program would help the growth of Linux, and encouraged people to contact me. The response was tremendous, and we immediately established a mailing list to help coordinate our discussions. Along the way, we found other individuals and groups who were also working on certification and tried to find ways to work together on this certification effort.

Meanwhile, a separate effort was underway, coordinated by Evan Leibovitch of the Canadian Linux User's Exchange (CLUE). Starting in April 1998, they established a mailing list focusing on certification and had gone quite far in discussing how a certification program might be implemented. The list grew rapidly and came to include people from around the world. At one point, their list included representatives of three distributions: Caldera, SuSE and Debian.

Last November, Jon “maddog” Hall of Linux International introduced me to Evan. We immediately saw the similarities between our two efforts and explored ways of combining the energy of our two groups After our groups united, we implemented an organizational structure to help work together and proceed along multiple paths to develop our program. As we proceeded, the initiative attracted a highly talented pool of volunteers, many of whom contributed (and continue to contribute) very long hours toward bringing our collective program to reality.

Many of us believe a certification program for Linux will occur. The question is whether we want that certification program to come from a particular vendor or have it evolve from within the Linux community.

The people who have come together behind our effort believe there are a number of reasons why certification is necessary. Briefly, we feel certification will do the following:

A longer description of some of these points can be found in my October 1998 article in Linux Gazette.