A 2006 retrospective

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Another LWN tradition is to review our predictions made at the beginning of the year to see just how badly wrong your editor was this time around. Those predictions were published in the January 4, 2006 edition, for those who wish to follow along from the source. Some of the comments posted to the article can also be interesting to read with a year's perspective. We'll not review every prediction made in that article. Some of them are sufficiently obvious ("Perl 6 will not be released," "the SCO case will drag on") or general ("the pace of kernel development will not slow") that little review is called for. Some of the others, however, offer some insights into how perspectives have changed over the last year (or, perhaps, how blind your editor was back then).

The very first prediction made was that the GPLv3 process would dominate the news. Your editor was not able to foresee, however, that the FSF would take the license revision as an opportunity to attack DRM head-on. What has happened over the last year, as evidenced by GPLv3 and in other places, is that many in the community now think that we have enough weight to throw around in support of goals beyond the simple creation of free software. Whether the exercise of this weight will lead to a more free society, or whether it will just make us more like the entertainment industry (which also thinks it has plenty of weight to use in pursuing power under copyright law) remains to be seen.

Some commenters doubted your editor's prediction that the non-free kernel module issue would come to a head this year. But, over the course of this year, a number of distributors swore off shipping such modules, those which continue to embrace proprietary modules have taken a fair amount of criticism, and the kernel developers seriously considered banning them outright. Whether all that constitutes "coming to a head" can be debated, but the fact remains: there is a great deal of resentment over proprietary kernel modules and this issue will not go away anytime soon.

Your editor predicted the return of European software patents. There were some stirrings over the year, but software patents have, for the most part, laid low. It would be foolish to believe that they will do so forever, though.

With regard to desktop Linux, your editor's advice was to not expect amazing advances, but that there would be steady progress. The movement of 3D technologies onto the Linux desktop may not qualify as an "amazing advance," but they are a big step regardless; Linux need defer to no other system in the eye candy department. A prediction that alternatives to OpenOffice.org would gain prominence did not really come through - but it is worth noting that the OLPC project has gone with a lightweight version of AbiWord.

One of the more controversial predictions said that the Fedora Project would have to make changes to maintain its position. Over the course of the year, Fedora abandoned the "Fedora Foundation" idea, gave up (belatedly) on Fedora Legacy, decided to lengthen its support period, and merged the Core and Extras distributions. The project has picked up a new energy, renewed its longstanding dedication to free software, and looks well poised to move forward with a stronger community focus.

Predicting that a Debian release would happen on schedule is always a daring thing to do. Things clearly did not work out that way, but substantial progress has been made. Debian Etch might not be that late, in the end. Predicting Emacs releases is equally risky, and Emacs 22 did not come out this year - but a couple of pretest releases did.

Your editor thought that Novell would "get its act together and become a truly successful Linux-based company." Oh well. That could yet happen, but, after the events of 2006, few people would see it as a foregone conclusion.

So what did your editor miss entirely? Big company moves were at the top of the list. The idea that Novell would make a deal with Microsoft - paying patent royalties in the process - was beyond your editor's imagination at the time. Similarly, the notion that Oracle would try to muscle into Linux support by repackaging Red Hat Enterprise Linux was a surprise. Free software has reached such a level of importance that the largest companies out there are paying attention.

Also missed was the open-sourcing of Java, though one could certainly quibble that we have not actually seen the code yet. Perhaps your editor should simply predict this event for 2007 and be dead-on. Seriously, however, this event has been delayed for so long that many of us had despaired of it ever happening. It does appear, however, that Jonathan Schwartz has brought a new emphasis on free software to Sun's top position; the planned release of Java under the GNU General Public License suggests that he is serious.

In the end, the easiest prediction to make was that our community would remain healthy, and that our software would continue to get better. Despite our disagreements and our mistakes we are going from one strength to the next. That helps make 2006 another pleasant year to look back on.