Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

On the political front, it is a fairly safe bet that the mobile patent wars will get worse. The participants in this battle appear to be tooling up for an extensive and protracted fight, and there seems to be a steady supply of new companies (British Telecom, for example) piling on in the hope of gaining a piece of the pie for themselves. Things may reach a point where it becomes impossible to market handsets or tablets in some parts of the world. One could hope that a paralyzed mobile market would suggest to lawmakers that the patent system is broken, and that those lawmakers would respond by reforming said system. Alas, a more likely outcome (though not in 2012) is the formation of a patent pool under strong "encouragement" by governments that ends the fights and establishes the positions of a small number of large players at the expense of new entrants. How free software will fare in such a world is far from clear.

The fight for a free Internet will also continue in full force in 2012. Your editor predicts that the current round of net-censorship bills in the US ("SOPA" and its variants) will be defeated. But the forces behind such laws never quit and eventually something distasteful will likely make it through the legislative process.

Laws like SOPA and governmental attempts to control the net in general seem to be causing concern beyond the small group of people who habitually worry about such things. As people wake up to threats to their freedom, they will see that free software is on the front line in the fight against censorship and repression. Hopefully that will result in a better awareness of the value of freedom. But it carries a risk that free software could find itself associated with piracy, crackers, and criminals. We could have an interesting public relations problem to deal with.

On the distributions front, it seems evident that Red Hat will have another great year. Various articles on the net are suggesting that 2012 will be its first $1 billion year, and that the company is looking to hire 1,000 more people. Red Hat has been helped by the growth of Linux in general, by its dominant position in the market, and, arguably, by the difficulties experienced by distributions like CentOS. It has become reasonably clear that, if one really needs the committed support that comes with RHEL, one really needs to just pay for RHEL. That said, the RHEL-rebuild distributions will certainly not be going away in the coming year; neither will the other commercial distributors.

But we will see more focused competition between distributors, with more attention paid to the addition of unique features to differentiate their offerings. There was a long period where most Linux distributions were about the same; the biggest differences were to be found in areas like package management, and they were easy to adjust to. Now we see distributions like Ubuntu focusing on their own desktop experience. Oracle seems to be trying to differentiate with more current kernels and an early move to technologies like Btrfs. Projects like GNOME are increasingly showing a desire to become distributions in their own right. Android and WebOS show the extent to which an ostensibly "Linux" system can differ from its peers. In a sense, the long-feared fragmentation of the Linux system is happening. It is good in that we have a diverse set of projects exploring ways to make a better operating system. But that diversity also threatens to scatter our efforts to the point that nothing ever becomes truly good enough to find widespread success.

Along those lines, Linux Mint will have a reckoning with reality in 2012. This distribution has gained a lot of attention with its approach to desktop design. But it remains a minor distribution, and, at some point, it can only become clear that the resources to maintain multiple distributions (Linux Mint 12, Mint Debian, Mint 11 LXDE, etc.), the MATE GNOME2 fork and the "Cinnamon" GNOME 3 fork simply are not there. Users will also eventually begin to wonder about things like security updates. Your editor fully expects Linux Mint to be a strong and popular project at the end of the year, but it will need to focus its efforts somewhat.

On a related topic, the GNOME3 wars will be long forgotten by the end of the year. Users will have either made their peace with GNOME3 or they will have moved on to something else. The growing availability of GNOME Shell extensions should help considerably. The various attempts to fork the GNOME environment or maintain GNOME2 will mostly fade away.

The fight for the attention of mobile device manufacturers will, instead, continue through 2012. Android is well established, of course, and it is hard to see that situation changing much. But there should be room for another free platform. Quite a few projects - GNOME, KDE, Tizen, WebOS, Boot to Gecko, etc. - would be delighted to occupy that space and be shipped on real products. They cannot all succeed, though. It would be a shame if they were to all fail and leave that space to Windows (which will make a big push on Nokia's handsets) in 2012.

Speaking of Android, mainline kernels will be able to run Android's user space by the end of the year - more or less. That is not the same as saying that all of the Android kernel code will make it into the mainline; some of it may be replaced by code with equivalent functionality. But a lot of hardware vendors are increasingly concerned with Android kernels, not mainline kernels, so the interest in closing the gap between the two will only grow.

The gap between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice will also grow. Over the year it will become increasingly clear that LibreOffice has captured the initiative and the developer energy in this space. LibreOffice will continue to improve while Apache OpenOffice struggles with the replacement of GPL-licensed code, adapting to "the Apache Way," and trying to produce a release based on a year-old beta. There are some good people working on Apache OpenOffice, but they are swimming against the current.

The kernel's "ARM mess" will be a memory by the end of the year as the effort to consolidate code and clean up subarchitecture implementations continues. The ARM tree was a victim of its own success; vendors actually listened to the pleas to work upstream and contributed vast amounts of code. Now that the problem is being addressed, the "victim" part will go away, leaving only the success; ARM will take its place as one of the primary Linux architectures, even if it does not become the primary architecture in 2012.

The security mess will not go away, unfortunately. Our widespread code repositories and distribution sites present an attractive target to anybody wishing to compromise large numbers of machines. Targeted attacks against these sites can only increase, and some of them will be successful. Our community as a whole is going to have to learn to take security much more seriously. That is starting to happen in some projects, but not in others. With luck, we will not wake up one morning to learn that we have distributed trojaned code to vast numbers of users - but there is no guarantee that we will be so lucky.

On a happier note, a longstanding request from LWN users will be satisfied in 2012: the site will finally use the UTF-8 encoding and will not be limited to the Latin-1 character set. So, soon, it may be possible to find text like "أي شخص يعتقد التوقعات في هذا الموقع هو أحمق" or "ನಿಮ್ಮ ಸಂಪಾದಕ ಒಂದು ಕಾಗದದ ಚೀಲ ಹೊರಗೆ ದಾರಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರೋಗ್ರಾಂ ಸಾಧ್ಯವಾಗಲಿಲ್ಲ" or "明けましておめでとうご ざいます" embedded directly within an LWN article without the need for obnoxious HTML escapes. Your editor predicts that change will come sometime quite soon.

Finally, your editor predicts that the world will not end in 2012. The Mayans, he claims, were worse at this prediction game than he is - and those who would draw conclusions from the Mayan calendar are even worse yet. Despite all the coming challenges, the free software world will not end either; instead, we will finish the year with more strength and momentum than we had at the beginning. It will be great fun to watch.