Looking back at 2007 [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
December 19, 2007

Consistent with our usual practice, LWN will not be publishing a Weekly Edition during the last full week of the year. This is thus the last such for 2007; the next weekly will be published on January 3, 2008. Also consistent with usual practice, you editor will look back on the year which is about to end, with an emphasis on evaluating how his predictions made at the beginning of the year came out. There is amusement to be had in exposing the flaws in one's crystal ball, but there is also value in seeing how one's view of the world has changed over the course of the year.

Your editor bravely predicted that GPLv3 would be finalized and adopted by the FSF; sure enough, that happened right on schedule. Your editor also admitted to having "no clue" of how the FSF would respond to the criticism of the anti-DRM provisions of GPLv3. Certainly it would have been hard to predict the addition of the "user product" language and associated exemptions. So far, the impact of GPLv3 has been relatively small, but use of this license will surely grow over time.

Another prediction said that somebody would be sued for the distribution of proprietary kernel modules. That did not happen - at least, not in a way that the public (or your editor) heard about it. What your editor did not foresee was the burst of energy coming from the Software Freedom Law Center on behalf of the BusyBox developers. Thus far, GPL enforcement activities continue to focus on the relatively clear-cut cases. They also continue to have a very high success rate. Still, going after a company like Verizon is an ambitious move; it will be interesting to see how that one settles out.

The end of SCO was predicted. Your editor thought it might happen in March, when new dispositive motions would once again be entertained by Judge Kimball. Instead, the clear end of SCO happened in August when the court ruled that Novell still owned the Unix source and that SCO owed Novell a chunk of money. Like a fish thrown on the shore, SCO will continue to flop around for a while, but there can be little doubt about its ultimate fate.

The prediction that there would be serious talk of patent reform did not really come through. There were a couple of U.S. court decisions in 2007 which, arguably, raised the bar slightly for patent trolls. In general, though, the software patent situation remains unchanged - and as dangerous as ever.

There were a couple of predictions about closed hardware, together saying, essentially, that the situation would get better but that the problem would not go away. Things clearly got better when AMD decided to open up information about ATI's video hardware and assist with the creation of free drivers for that hardware. The progress toward a viable Atheros wireless chipset driver for Linux is also a happy development. The situation has improved, and will continue to do so.

[PULL QUOTE: Your editor predicted a serious war on bloat as people got tired of running out of memory. Wishful thinking, it seems, is alive and well. END QUOTE] Your editor predicted a serious war on bloat as people got tired of running out of memory. Wishful thinking, it seems, is alive and well. In practice, people just bought more memory; even the OLPC project decided it had to increase the amount of memory in its XO system. Your editor will not be repeating this prediction for 2008.

"Fedora will come into its own as a free, community-oriented distribution" has, beyond any doubt, come true. The Fedora 7 release brought community developers in from the margins, and Fedora 8 solidified the new process. The bulk of the packages in Fedora are now maintained by community developers. Red Hat's controlling hand, while still clearly present, is weaker than before. Fedora leader Max Spevack has presided over a crucial transformation of this important project; he will be moving on to other challenges early in 2008, but will be leaving behind a distribution in far better shape than the one he inherited a few years ago.

Predicting Debian releases is a dangerous business, but, in this case, Debian Etch was close enough to make it a relatively safe proposition. Your editor had also suggested (facetiously) that the Debian developers would subsequently go back to arguing about firmware in the kernel; that quite clearly did not happen.

The prediction that free software would play a larger role in online gaming was, for the most part, wishful thinking again. The release of the Second Life client code was a step in the right direction, but not much happened after that. Your editor still hopes that free software will be at the core of the games of the future, or he may never see his children again.

The Microsoft/Novell deal, predicted your editor, would blow over with relatively few consequences. In many ways that was true. One could argue that the whole "235 patents" routine would have come out anyway - we heard similar claims before Novell signed this deal. Your editor failed to guess that a whole stream of companies (Samsung, Xandros, LG Electronics, Linspire, Turbolinux) would follow Novell into similar agreements, though.

Your editor suggested that the "open source" term would suffer as a result of companies trying to retain higher levels of control over "open source" code. Certainly the OSI's approval of the CPAL "badgeware" license will not have helped in this regard. On the other hand, SugarCRM decided to just go with the GPLv3 in favor of its attribution-required license. As a whole, "open source" means almost what it meant one year ago.

Contrary to prediction, there have not been OLPC systems distributed to millions of children - though thousands should start getting them soon. We are still waiting to see what impact the OLPC project will really have - on free software, and on the world as a whole. Stay tuned.

Finally, the growth of desktop Linux was predicted, though your editor refrained from saying that 2007 would be the year of the Linux desktop. Clearly, progress has been made in that direction - we now have major vendors like Dell selling desktop systems, Wal-Mart's desktop offering sold out in days, and the number of pocket-sized "desktops" running Linux continues to grow.

Perhaps the biggest thing which your editor missed entirely was the fight over Microsoft's proposed OOXML standard. This issue came to light in January of this year, though it had been simmering for a little while before - the ECMA TC45 committee was already considering this proposal in the middle of 2006. The fight over the fast-tracking of OOXML and the ensuing questions on just how the community should work with the standards practice will continue to echo into 2008.

Overall, your editor feels like the predictions went reasonably well. Too well, perhaps; next year's predictions may need to be a little more adventurous. Those predictions will be posted in the January 3 edition. In the mean time, your editor wishes for a great holiday season and new year for everybody in the community; we have accomplished much over the last year and have many things to celebrate.

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