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A 2010 retrospective
Your editor is not really prepared for the end of 2010; truly, he has not
yet come to terms with the end of the 20th century, but so be it. Ready or
not, it's time to look back at the just-finished year, with an eye toward
making fun of the predictions which were
made back at the beginning. Your editor is shocked to discover that he
didn't get everything right.
There were two hardware-related predictions: that the awareness of the value of open hardware would grow, and that there would be a number of Linux-based tablets. Neither was realized in any complete sort of way. The success of Android shows some level of appreciation for openness; it can be instructive to look at second-hand sales of Android handsets and note how many of them are described as "rooted." The Free Software Foundation also tried to raise awareness with its endorsement program but, as your editor said at the time, that program appears unlikely to have much real-world effect. As far as Linux-based tablets go: we have seen a few Android devices, with Samsung's Galaxy Tab being the most prominent. But Android on tablets has been surprisingly slow to arrive, and MeeGo, needless to say, is slower yet. Perhaps 2011 will be the year of the Linux tablet. The prediction that software patents would be a problem was not particularly hard to make. Sure enough, a number of suits have been launched, mostly in the mobile computing area. Copyright assignment policies: the prediction that there would be debate around such policies was accurate. The LibreOffice project, in particular, had a surprisingly high-volume (in both the amplitude and quantity sense) debate on copyright assignment, but the developers behind LibreOffice seem determined that they will be more successful without any such policy. The GNOME project and the newly-formed MeeGo project also came out strongly against copyright assignment. These policies remain firmly entrenched in many projects, but the trend appears to be against them. That Oracle's acquisition of Sun would proceed was also a relatively easy prediction. Your editor said that MySQL would be treated with a relatively light hand, which has proved mostly to be the case. What your editor missed was how badly most of the rest of Sun's free software projects would fare. Significant forks of OpenSolaris and OpenOffice now exist, and there is discontent in other projects as well. Oracle's relationship with the kernel community remains good, but the company seems to care little about projects higher in the stack. The browser wars: perhaps they have heated up again, as predicted; certainly Google Chrome seems to be gaining strength. Mozilla is competing with a number of interesting initiatives, including a mobile version of Firefox. Good stuff is happening - but Internet Explorer still hangs on to over half of all traffic. The prediction that solid-state storage devices would go into wider use was boring and obvious. Perhaps more interesting was the claim that some distributors would be offering Btrfs. That has certainly happened; your editor did not foresee, though, that the MeeGo project would adopt Btrfs as its default filesystem. The rumors of the death of the big kernel lock were only exaggerated by a little; the 2.6.37 kernel (which should come out just after the new year) can be built in a useful mode without the BKL entirely. The growth of LLVM was another fairly obvious prediction; a number of interesting things have happened with that project in the last year. Identifying Unladen Swallow as one of those things turned out to be a bad choice, though; whether Unladen Swallow is dead or just resting remains to be seen, but it is not a hotbed of activity at the moment. Your editor predicted a "scary security incident" involving mobile devices. There have been some examples of malicious Android applications, but nothing that qualifies as a truly scary incident - that we know about, anyway. The scary stuff, instead, happened at other levels, with the Google attacks and the Stuxnet worm being the most prominent examples. The "year of the sandbox" was also predicted, but nothing of any real interest seems to have happened in that area. It's not surprising that there was a lot of discussion of cloud computing, as predicted. The sun also rose every morning. On the other hand, the predicted release of GNOME 3 did not happen. The predicted increase in Python 3 adoption is also hard to find; there does seem to be a little more interest, but most developers seem to be in no hurry to leave 2.x behind. The last prediction - on the importance of community distributions - is hard to measure, but it's not clear that the situation has changed markedly. What we are seeing is a bit more attention to staying close to upstream projects and working more closely with them. In its own way, Oracle's decision to slip a 2.6.32-based kernel into its RHEL5 clone is an example of this. MeeGo's desire to push patches upstream rather than carrying them is another. So what did your editor miss entirely? The seeming increase in high-profile forks (LibreOffice, Mageia, IllumOS, ...) is one of them. The creation of MeeGo through the merger of Moblin and Maemo was another. In retrospect, it's not surprising that the sharks would start to circle around Novell, but your editor certainly did not think that the company might be in different hands by the end of the year. The failure of PHP6 was also obvious in retrospect. One other interesting omission might, at the beginning of the year, have been phrased something like "the embedded Linux world will begin to get its act together." In this year, we've seen the creation of the Linaro project to try to improve tools and support for the important ARM architecture. The Yocto project - meant to ease the process of creating embedded distributions - launched. A number of embedded vendors came together and decided to standardize on the 2.6.35 kernel, which will receive improved long-term support as a result. The number of embedded vendors contributing to free software projects is growing. There is plenty of room for improvement yet, but things seem to be headed in the right direction. The most obvious prediction of all was that free software would be stronger than ever. Despite our ups and downs, our flame wars and lawsuits, our bugs and our forks, we're doing great. It's been another good year for Linux and free software, and it has been a pleasure covering it for this audience. Thanks to all of you for making this community happen. (Log in to post comments)
A 2010 retrospective Posted Dec 23, 2010 9:09 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] Well, there's at least one MeeGo-based tablet out in the shops: the WeTab (http://wetab.mobi/en/). Only in Germany and I think in the Netherlands, and initially it didn't work all that well. But after two months of software updates, by the time the MeeGo Confererence started my WeTab ran pretty smooth. And it was definitely a geek magnet at the conference, especially with Calligra Mobile (back then still called FreOffice) running on it: a touch-friendly office suite for tablets. So if "one" is a number, the prediction was correct :-).
Scary mobile security incident Posted Dec 23, 2010 12:44 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
I think this qualifies: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Banking-trojan... - the background is that the Zeus trojan is a very sophisticated "man in the browser" trojan for Windows PCs that spies on online banking transactions and steals money from accounts, while hiding the existence of these transactions and the account balance by editing the HTML output of the banking website.
The new part is that it now sends an SMS to the user's mobile with a download link for a mobile trojan that breaks the per-transaction authentication SMS messages the bank sends, which otherwise would stop Zeus from working.
IE market share Posted Dec 23, 2010 18:43 UTC (Thu) by Simetrical (guest, #53439) [Link]
Wikipedia has some web browser market share stats <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser_market_share> that show IE at less than 50% overall market share. These include Wikimedia's own statistics, which are probably pretty accurate as far as these things go -- you'd think overall web usage would correlate pretty well with Wikipedia usage. If IE isn't really at less than 50% market share on the public Internet, it's pretty close.
Presumably a large contributing factor was the EU order that Windows users get to choose their default browser. StatCounter Europe, cited in that article, shows the lowest IE market share and the second-highest Chrome market share of all of them, which is the outcome you'd expect from the ballot: many users clicking on the familiar Google name.
IE market share Posted Dec 25, 2010 3:02 UTC (Sat) by vachi (subscriber, #67512) [Link]
I guess most of the IE traffics are from corporate machines. You know, IT people have malice towards ignorant users :-)
PHP 6 failure Posted Dec 23, 2010 20:33 UTC (Thu) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]
I haven't heard anything about what happened to PHP 6. I rely on LWN to keep my updated on such things - how about an article? Or is it old news?
PHP 6 failure Posted Dec 26, 2010 4:54 UTC (Sun) by kingdon (subscriber, #4526) [Link] On the first page of hits for a google search for "PHP 6" is Resetting PHP 6 from March 24, 2010. Perhaps failing to link this from the article was an oversight.
PHP 6 failure Posted Dec 26, 2010 18:01 UTC (Sun) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link] Excellent - thank you :-) I must have missed that first time round. Gerv
A 2010 retrospective Posted Dec 26, 2010 22:53 UTC (Sun) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link]
Thank *you* and the LWN team for making this possible!
A 2010 retrospective Posted Jan 6, 2011 10:09 UTC (Thu) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
> One other interesting omission might, at the beginning of the year, have been phrased something like "the embedded Linux world will begin to get its act together." In this year, we've seen the creation of the Linaro project to try to improve tools and support for the important ARM architecture.
It was high time for ARM & its licensees to get their act together to compete against Intel. Once Intel gets its power usage vs. performance vs. price close enought to ARM, ARM is likely to lose the higher end embedded market.
IMHO only real chance for ARM there is to get Linux (distros) working by default on any random new ARM HW and even then it will be at some disadvantage against x86 if it can't keep the price/power usage edge.
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