Joel, following up on LSB opportunistically sounds like a decent plan to me. The reason that I would recommend considering it is that some of the major Linux vendors are planning on moving towards it, namely Red Hat and Suse.
Unfortunately, I'm the wrong person to figure any of this stuff out since I'm not technical. If need be, though, I could go through all the technical documentation and compare what they recommend vs what we ultimately decide on the organization.
Tom, I figure a reference platform suggests a reference OS, which I would generally assume would be Linux since most people are using Linux in the community. If we decide on Linux, then we need to choose a distro. Debian is set up quite differently from RH and both are different than Gentoo. LSB seems to be about reaching some basic consensus among all the various distros.
A reference platform seems to be just a suggestion. I agree with Joel that if it's easy, we should do it, just to make it easier to fit within various distros.
talli
