LWN's 2012 retrospective

Your editor was strongly tempted to skip out on the task of writing the 2012 year-end retrospective article. After all, the process of going through January's predictions and seeing how wrong they were is somewhat painful and embarrassing. Even worse, according to reliable sources, the world is scheduled to end just after this article is to be published, so it hardly seems worth the effort. But a quick consideration of how your editor's investment portfolio has performed under the guidance of similarly reliable sources suggests that covering all the bases might be prudent; it seems that some other peoples' predictions are even worse than those found here.

So, with a heavy heart, the process of reviewing last January's predictions began. And, in fact, the news wasn't all bad. The mobile patent wars did, indeed, get worse, to the point that it has gotten difficult to market certain devices in certain parts of the world. The fight for a free Internet continues, and SOPA was turned back as predicted. Red Hat did indeed have a good year. A number of the other, relatively obvious predictions also came through reasonably well. There is value, it seems, in not going too far out on a limb.

Another prediction read that we would see more focused competition between distributors, with each seeking to differentiate more from the others. To an extent that has certainly happened; witness all the work that has gone into making Ubuntu different from the rest. Other times, though, differences have not been seen as a selling point; Oracle's attempt to woo CentOS users is a case in point. So this prediction was, at best, only partially right. In the end, we are still far from having an understanding of what makes a perfect Linux distribution, even when judged through the narrow lens of commercial success.

At the beginning of the year, it appeared that the Linux Mint project had taken on too many projects; given that it had several versions of its distribution to support, along with two desktop forks, your editor reasoned that a "reckoning with reality" was in the works. At the end of the year, one might conclude that progress has slowed in some areas, especially with the MATE desktop. But, if a "reckoning with reality" has occurred, it must be concluded that reality does not drive a particularly hard bargain. The Linux Mint project appears to be vital and healthy.

Similarly, one might well conclude that the LibreOffice project is broader-based and stronger than Apache OpenOffice, but the former has not eclipsed the latter as predicted. The Apache project has managed to get its organizational issues worked out and graduate from the Apache incubator; clearly, it has more staying power than many of us might have thought.

Perhaps the worst, most wishful-thinking-tinged prediction, though, was the one that "the GNOME 3 wars will be long forgotten by the end of the year." One need only have a look at the comment stream that appears on any GNOME-related news to see that the wounds are still open and fresh. Someday the community will accept GNOME as it is, but that did not come to pass in 2012. Learning from experience, your editor is unlikely to predict a calming of the waters around GNOME 3 (or systemd) in 2013.

So it appears that this year's predictions were, as usual, a mixed bag. A true evaluation of a set of predictions is not complete, though, without looking at what was not predicted. As is often the case, your editor missed a few things that, in retrospect, should have been on the list.

For example, the regime change in the GNU libc project was well underway when the 2012 predictions were written. A more attentive eye would have called attention to the increasingly consensus-oriented way in which that project was being run. Making this project more contributor-friendly without a fork was a major achievement for everybody involved; one can only hope that this type of change will be repeated in other projects where it is necessary.

Mandriva's decision to hand control of its distribution to the community also makes sense in retrospect. Letting go of a project and hoping for community help is, after all, often the response of a company with intractable financial problems, especially if the company is somewhat community-oriented to begin with. It has been clear for a while that Mandriva SA has not been able to pull together the resources to develop its distribution properly; hoping that the community can do better is an obvious response to that situation.

Two items that would have been easy to predict in general — but difficult in the specifics — were the leap-second bug and the backdooring of Piwik. It is well understood that infrequently tested code will develop bugs over time; the leap second code had not been invoked in the real world since 2008. One could argue that somebody should have checked the code for cobwebs as the 2012 leap second approached, but nobody foresaw the problem. Meanwhile, it has been a while since the addition of backdoors to software distributions seemed to be a regular occurrence. But free software projects, especially those producing net-facing software like Piwik, will remain an attractive target for those who would like easy ways into otherwise well-secured systems. We will see this kind of thing happening again.

Finally, sometimes the most difficult-to-predict events can do the most to strengthen one's faith in humanity. An interesting trial in Oracle's software patent suit against Google was easy to foresee. But who would have imagined that the judge would learn Java and implement some of the claimed techniques on his own? We are far from fixing the patent system in the US (or anywhere else, for that matter), but there are signs that influential people are starting to figure out that there is a problem.

Of course, some things are just too routine to predict. Once upon a time, a community that could release six major kernels and an uncountable number of major releases of higher-level software in one year would have been seen as a hopeless fantasy. Now such things go almost unnoticed. Our community is strong, and free software continues relentlessly toward world domination. As a whole, it has been another good year.

We at LWN would like to thank our readers who have supported us through yet another year; it is worth noting that LWN will celebrate its 15th anniversary in January. We never predicted that we would be doing this for so long; it has been a good ride and we are far from done. Thanks to all of you who make it possible for us to continue to write from the heart of the Linux development community. On a personal note, your editor would like to especially thank all of you who offered your support through an exceptionally difficult year; you made a difference and it is much appreciated.

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