The Grumpy Editor's 2008 retrospective

What was predicted

Your editor's first prediction was that support for Flash playback would mature in 2008. In some sense, that may be true. Your editor's desktop system, running the Rawhide build of Gnash, can now faithfully display a wide variety of Flash ads, web site "intros," and various other thoroughly useless bits of media. A Flash-based "interactive tour" offered by LWN's bank worked nicely. But support for many other Flash features, including audio and simple playback from online sites, still is not especially solid, and other interactive Flash applications do not work at all. This problem, it seems, is still not solved.

The prediction of the KDE 4.0 release required little in the way of foresight, as did the prediction that users would be unhappy. That stage was well set before the beginning of the year. A continued focus on power management was also an easy thing to foresee; there will be great value in making our systems more power-efficient into the indefinite future.

Flush from those two obvious successes, your editor went off and stated that the bulk of the realtime tree would be merged into the mainline kernel by the end of the year. Oh well. Your editor should know by now that expecting deterministic merge times for realtime patches is a sure path to disappointment; latencies in this area are always higher than one would like. In this case, the realtime developers got stuck in a high-priority interrupt (taking over the x86 architecture) with the result that realtime work got preempted and suffered from severe starvation.

As predicted, debate over Microsoft's OOXML format continued, and Microsoft succeeded in obtaining standard status for that format anyway. Things have since gotten quieter, though, perhaps because people see it as a done deal and no longer worth fighting about.

The GPL was the subject of two predictions this year. One was that more projects, perhaps even glibc, would move to GPLv3. There is a steady stream of analyst verbiage to the effect that GPLv3 is quickly growing in popularity (example), but the truth of the matter is that the number of conversions in projects which really matter appears to be low. Projects with significant numbers of developers and users continue to approach GPLv3 with caution.

The other prediction was that GPL enforcement actions would continue, and perhaps grow. The recent FSF lawsuit against Cisco makes it clear that the GPL enforcers are serious about what they are doing. Your editor cannot help but wonder, though, whether the increasingly litigious actions by the Software Freedom Law Center might not eventually lead to a serious backlash within the community. We are about freedom, not punitive damages. Enforcement of the GPL is necessary if we expect our licenses to be taken seriously, but overly zealous - or greedy - litigation could encourage those who say that use of free software exposes companies to an unacceptable level of risk.

Your editor included a rosy prediction about the One Laptop Per Child project and where it would go over the course of the year. In fact, OLPC has continued to work toward its goal of putting laptops into the hands of children around the world. But your editor completely missed the way internal divisions would rise to the surface and distract OLPC developers from what they are trying to do. OLPC seems to have moved beyond the worst of that, and much-needed development on the Sugar software continues. But the project seems far from its original goals, and the increasing popularity of ultra-mobile systems, while vindicating the original vision behind the OLPC hardware, threatens to render the XO hardware obsolete and irrelevant.

Ever the optimist, your editor said that the days of hardware hassles would be over. We are closer. Finding an off-the-shelf system - server, desktop, laptop, or palmtop - which is fully supported by Linux is now easily done. OK, maybe the modem is not supported, but few people will be inconvenienced by that omission anymore. That said, there will probably never be a shortage of uncooperative hardware manufacturers; if we value our free operating system, we must continue to support manufacturers who work with our community, and avoid those which do not.

The prediction that the intensity of competition between distributors would increase was reasonably well satisfied. One need only look at Novell's "migrate from Red Hat" offering or the continued attacks on Ubuntu, not all of which have to do with its community participation.

Finally, the three "community" predictions at the end of last January's article were all satisfied reasonably well. None of them were especially daring, so that should not be surprising.

What was not predicted

One commenter in January asked about the lack of predictions about SCO. In December, it is hard to say that SCO deserved a place there. The company still exists in some form, but it no longer has much to warrant the attention of the Linux community. Your editor predicts that there will be no SCO predictions in 2009 either.

So what else did your editor miss? Perhaps at the top of the list is the evolution of the Linux platform as it is used in mobile devices, and in cellular telephones in particular. Google's (unpredicted by your editor) Android platform has made a splash, regardless of what one might think of its openness. The first Android phone has been reasonably well received, and it would appear that more are on the way. The merger of the LiPS and LIMO consortia shows that some consolidation is happening in this area. The announced plans to open Symbian were also an interesting development. In the near future, the handset business seems likely to be firmly dominated by free software - though, alas, the bulk of those handsets will not be designed to pass the benefits of that freedom on to their owners.

Your editor has often predicted software patent troubles, though he did not do so in 2008. What was completely unforeseen, though, was Red Hat's resolution with Firestar Software. The company got itself out of a patent bind, and, in the process, removed the patent as a threat to the wider development and user community too. We may see this sort of solution repeated for patent problems in the future - if we are lucky.

Finally, unpredicted - and unpredictable - was the series of "infrastructure issues" which shut down much of the Fedora project for a good month. That episode showed us a number of things: how much some of us depend on our distributors' infrastructure, how vulnerable we can be to intrusions, and how the interests of the companies behind some distributions can interfere with the availability of useful information. Months after the fact, we still have no idea what happened with the Fedora project; it is not unreasonable to wonder if we will ever know.

Despite problems like that, and other small distractions (the total meltdown of the global financial system, for example), Linux has only grown stronger over the last year. Our community has grown, our software has gotten better, and the economy around free software has gotten stronger. Your editor predicted that, too, but not even he is so arrogant as to claim credit for having foreseen something nearly as obvious as the sunrise.