On Tue, 12 Nov 1996, Mark Brinicombe wrote:

> This means that the library would need to be linked to a standard
> address and everything would access the shared library from that
> address. This is the Linux a.out approach to shared libraries as I
> understand it.  It means that every shared library needs to be given its
> own base address in memory that will not clash with any other code so
> that it can be shared across processes. 

That's correct.  The Linux community found it essentially unworkable,
because you need somebody to globally coordinate base addresses, and this
is the reason behind the switch to ELF and PIC. 

phil