Looking back at 2004

LWN, like many publications, is not immune to the temptation to make predictions as the new year comes. We also like to look back at the end of the year to see how well our crystal ball actually worked. Predictions offer a clue to how the world appeared to us one year ago, and can thus help us to understand how our view has changed.

Besides, there's usually at least one hilarious error which is good for a smile. So, without further ado, let's look back at LWN's 2004 predictions.

Enterprise Linux. We concluded that the "enterprise Linux" business would do well in 2004 - not a particularly difficult prediction to make. Red Hat's business has indeed done well, and SUSE/Novell is coming along too. The future still looks bright for the enterprise Linux field.

We also predicted a growing backlash against enterprise Linux and their supporting business models, and the possible emergence of free alternatives. Certainly, resentment toward the enterprise distributors continues to exist in some parts of our community, and some of those people are doing something about it. But many of the projects which aim to undercut the enterprise Linux business model - CaOS, Whitebox Linux, UserLinux, etc. - appear to have made little progress over the last year.

Perhaps the largest surprise in this area is the emergence of Ubuntu Linux, which is an attempt to provide the best of a 100% free Linux distribution with longer-term support options. Ubuntu has succeeded in making a big initial splash; whether that will turn into a successful business remains to be seen.

Desktop Linux. From our viewpoint, it looked as if the KDE/GNOME flame wars of the past could return, driven by the distributors' need to minimize their support costs and choose one desktop or the other. Certainly that commercial pressure continues to exist, as witnessed by Ubuntu's choice to offer very much a GNOME-oriented distribution. But the desktop development projects have little interest in fighting with each other, and the flame wars show no real sign of returning.

What we are seeing instead is increased cooperation over bits of infrastructure which are useful to both projects. And when a distribution emphasizes one desktop over the other, the community tends to fill in the gap. See, for example, the Gnoppix and Kubuntu efforts. One year ago, we failed to fully appreciate the maturity of the desktop development projects. They are far too busy creating great software to be bothered with fighting each other.

We also made the obvious prediction that desktop Linux would make great progress and amaze us. We failed to see some of the specifics, however, especially the mainstream attention attracted by the Firefox browser. Firefox has arguably become the best browser available on any platform and the world is beginning to notice.

The SCO case. We figured that SCO might find a "backbone-challenged" Linux user who would choose "licensing" over a court fight; SCO found such a user in the form of EV1Servers.net. The EV1 agreement did not help SCO much, however, in terms of public relations, stock price, or cash flow. Neither did SCO's other suits, launched against DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone. The DaimlerChrysler case appears to have died outright, and the AutoZone suit (which has little to do with Linux) looks weak at best.

We predicted that "by the end of 2004, the SCO cases will probably still be alive in some form, but the end will be in sight." That much seems about right. If IBM's summary judgment motions and Novell's copyright ownership attacks do not do the job, SCO's cash situation may well bring the whole show to a quick end.

The GPL. We suggested that the GPL might finally be tested in court in 2004. That happened in Germany as the result of an enforcement action by the Netfilter project. The GPL was upheld by the German court; its detractors can no longer say that no court has ruled on its validity. Meanwhile, SCO has backed off from its attacks, saying that it never meant to question the GPL's validity as a license. It seems that the company has, belatedly, figured out that nothing else gives it the right to continue to distribute GPL-licensed software.

Security. We worried that the string of attacks against free software development sites would continue into 2005. Certainly there were problems, such as the recent compromise of freedesktop.org, but the attack on the community as a whole - if that's what it was - appears to have stopped for now.

Our prediction that hardened Linux systems would be more widely deployed by the end of 2004 now looks optimistic. Work continues toward that end, but hardening a Linux system (while keeping it usable) is a difficult task, and progress has been slower than many people had anticipated.

Kernel. The prediction that the 2.7 development series would start seemed obvious, but it was wrong. We did sense that the development process was changing, however, and predicted that the next development series would differ from 2.5. The pressures which might lead to a new development series still seem to be mostly absent - mostly because the 2.6 development model tends to prevent those pressures from building up.

What we missed: LWN would like to apply a small patch to its 2004 predictions to fix a few bugs. So we now predict that, in 2004:

• Despite all appearances, software patents will not be enacted in the European Union. Yet.

• Mandrakesoft will emerge from bankruptcy, shake off much of its debt, and start to function as a profitable company.

• Longstanding frictions within the XFree86 project will force it to split; the core of X development will reassemble under the X.org banner.

• New FUD attacks against Linux will target total cost of ownership and intellectual property concerns; none will have much success.

• The Debian "sarge" release will not happen, and, in fact, will appear to be no closer at the end of 2004. Increasingly, Debian offshoot distributions will handle the task of creating release-ready versions of that distribution.

• Some large companies will publicly promise not to use their patents against Linux users, or, even better, to use their patent portfolios to defend (at least some) Linux users against patent attacks.

And so on.

We did get one thing right, though: 2004 was an interesting year in the free software world. We may just have to reuse that prediction for 2005 as well.

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