LWN should present Linux's 3 year plan

LWN should present Linux's 3 year plan

I think the LWN editors are uniquely well positioned to publish a 3 year Linux roadmap that, while just your point of view, could be a baseline that everyone references (if just to disagree).

I would love an article every 6 months or so where LWN presents Linux's 1 to 3 year plan. Of course, to be comparable to the Windows roadmap, you'd want to include all the related software that regular people think of as part of the OS. So, you'd report not just on improving pre-emption and Infiniband support in the kernel, but summarize the roadmaps for X.org, Gnome, KDE, Firefox, yum, OpenOffice, etc. And, you'd want to spend special time talking about projects like Xen and Reiserfs that will bring powerful new features when and if they're incorporated.

And, what about the fact that the roadmap would certainly be wrong? So what? It would likely be just as accurate as Microsoft's, and LWN's opinions of where things are going are just as valid and relevant as Linus's, Stallman's, or anyone elses.

In fact, I think this kind of roadmap could be great PR for LWN, where you could issue a press release every 6 months detailing the major advances and changes in the 3 year plan. This would likely be picked up by the rest of the tech press (and sometimes even the NYT and WSJ), and bring LWN a lot of new subscribers. (Note that the dumb Information Week article prompting the idea already references lwn.)

The roadmap itself could largely consist of links to old articles on each area and to the external roadmaps that the individual projects publish. So, there probably would not even be that much work involved. But, the lwn roadmap could be a central repository of links to cool stuff coming down the line.