Looking forward to 2010

On that note, here's your editor's thoughts for 2010. Any relation to reality is purely coincidental.

Open hardware platforms will be seen as increasingly important by the general public. Anybody who saw Verizon's heavy advertising campaign for its Android-based "Droid" offering will have understood that openness is now seen as a selling point in the mobile phone market - something which was not true even a year or two ago. Apple has done us a favor by showing how painful a restricted platform can be - even if it is a relatively open one. Future offerings, including the much-hyped "tablet" machines, will be judged by many criteria, one of which will be "who decides which applications I can run on it?" Locked-down systems will suffer as a result of their closed nature.

We'll see a number of Linux-based tablet computers offered to the market this year. What may take a bit longer to see is just what all of these machines will really be good for.

Software patents will strike close to home again. Nokia's suit against Apple is an especially ominous development. We are seeing the opening of a whole new computing market where none of the traditionally dominating companies have a commanding share. So it's a bit of a gold rush, and some companies will undoubtedly rush to gain their gold by way of the courts.

Copyright assignment policies will be debated by numerous projects over the course of the year. In the past year, the (attempted, in-progress) acquisition of MySQL (by way of Sun) by Oracle has clearly shown how assignment of copyrights to a corporation can go wrong, and Canonical's imposition of an assignment policy has created a backlash of its own. Even Eben Moglen, who has argued for copyright assignments in the past, has stated publicly that MySQL would be better off with a more diverse ownership structure. Developers in the future will think harder about signing assignment agreements, and projects will wonder whether their interests are truly best served by imposing assignment agreements. Copyright assignment agreements will not go away, but, like heavy-handed trademark policies, they will come to be seen an an impediment to freedom which is often counterproductive.

Speaking of MySQL, Oracle's acquisition of Sun will proceed without the imposition of major changes by the European Union. Regardless of its long-term plans, Oracle will treat MySQL with a light hand in the coming year. There will almost certainly be attempts to fork the project, though, regardless of how Oracle behaves.

The browser war will heat up again, but the main contestants will be free software. Firefox holds a commanding position, but its heavy weight and long startup time are enough to push some users to the competition - which, increasingly, looks to be Google's Chrome. If Google continues to develop the browser, and continues to avoid fatal errors like disallowing ad blocking extensions, Chrome may hold a significant part of the market by the end of the year.

Solid-state storage devices will come into wider use this year, with some interesting results. For example, the above-mentioned long startup time for Firefox tends to just vanish when the browser is SSD-based. Wider use of SSDs will tend to hide lazy or inefficient application development, but it will also put more pressure on the kernel's block subsystem, which will struggle to keep up with rapidly-increasing operation rates.

Adventurous distributors will be offering Btrfs by the end of the year. The filesystem will be feature-complete and stabilizing, but it will still be very much for adventurous (and well backed up) users at that point. Ext4, instead, will be moving beyond community distributions and into "enterprise" production use.

The big kernel lock will be gone from the mainline kernel. Actually, it will probably remain in a number of places, but things will have reached a point where a lock_kernel() call is an indication of old, unmaintained, and unused code. On any reasonably current hardware, a leading-edge kernel will be able to run with no BKL use at all. This work will be part of the larger job of getting the realtime preemption patch set into the mainline, but your editor dares not attempt another prediction on when that task will be complete.

Production use of LLVM will be on the rise as this compiler matures and stabilizes. Some of the most interesting uses are likely to be in nontraditional projects like Unladen Swallow.

There will be a scary security incident involving mobile Linux devices. Our security is pretty good, but it's far from perfect; just think, for example, about the number of bugs likely to be found in wireless network drivers, which are quite complex and reviewed by relatively few people.

Speaking of security, 2010 will be the year of the sandbox. Technologies like SELinux, AppArmor, and TOMOYO will not be going away, but increasing numbers of people will decide that many security objectives are more easily obtained by just placing at-risk processes into their own box.

There will be lots of talk of clouds, with companies stumbling over each other to become the host for some portion of our lives. Your editor can only hope that, at some point, this rush toward highly centralized services will be countered by a push for personal control of data. Perhaps members of our community will make it easy for nontechnical users to set up "cloudlets" for individual or small-group use, with a focus on individual control and portability.

GNOME 3 will be released. Learning from the KDE 4 experience, the GNOME developers will promote their work less and focus more on not breaking things for users. The result will be a launch which draws relatively little attention, of either the good or the bad variety, but which lays the base for the platform's future development.

Developers will start using Python 3 as that language becomes more widely available in community distributions. By the end of the year, a small number of Python 3 programs will be in reasonably wide use. Meanwhile, we'll still be waiting for Perl 6.

Community distributions will grow in commercial importance over the course of the year. Distributions like Debian and Gentoo already show up in surprising places, with prominent organizations choosing them for their combination of stability, broad software selection, and great support. More companies will begin to realize that the "enterprise distribution" model is not perfect for all situations and will go looking for solutions which bring them closer to the communities which create all of that software in the first place.

Linux and free software will be stronger than ever at the end of the year. Yes, your editor makes this prediction every year, but it has proved rather more reliable than most of the others. It makes sense to go with a known winner, and, in any case, this prediction is easy to justify. The software keeps getting better, the community gets larger, and the value of free software is becoming more widely understood. There doesn't seem to be any reason for any of that to change anytime soon.