LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 2, 2003

Obviously incorrect 2003 predictions

It's that time of year again. Traditionally the first LWN Weekly Edition of the year includes some predictions of what may happen in the near future. It is worthwhile, occasionally, to step back and think about what may be on the horizon, even though the real thing will, as always, include surprises that we are not able to anticipate.

Besides, real news tends to be scarce about now.

So, without further ado, here's a few Obviously Incorrect Predictions for the next year.

• Use of Linux in government will increase, especially outside of the U.S. Government, officials are increasingly concerned about security, long-term public access to records, costs, and the health of the local software industry. Free software offers help in all of those areas. Governments move slowly, but there will be significant steps toward governmental adoption of free software in the coming year.

• There will be high-profile desktop deployments, inside and outside of government. Linux as a desktop system is good enough for many users now, and is only getting better. As the number of success stories grows, more organizations will take the plunge and switch over to free software.

• There will be a direct patent challenge to one or more free software products. Thus far, there has been a great deal of nervousness about software patents, and people have occasionally had to code their way around patent issues. But there has been a distinct lack of actual infringement suits. Suing a free software user for patent infringement will be a powerful way of creating uncertainty throughout the community, however; 2003 may well be the year that this weapon gets used.

• It will be a watershed year in intellectual property law, but we are not foolish enough to try to predict which way it will go. It could be that, in 2003, copyright extension is struck down, the DMCA is revised and defanged, and the entertainment industry figures out that it needs to go after pirates instead of harassing its customers. Or the courts could be hostile, the CBDTPA could be passed, new encryption restrictions could surface, and "trusted computing systems" could come closer to reality.

  The first scenario is not out of the question. The copyright extension and ElcomSoft cases have done a lot to raise awareness of the excesses of American (and, increasingly, worldwide) intellectual property law. The costs (and vulnerabilities) of copy protection systems are increasingly apparent to all. We won the encryption battle, and we could well win this one too. But the forces behind the attempted intellectual property takeover will not give up easily. One way or the other, 2003 will be interesting.

• The 2.6 kernel will be released, but probably not until well into the second half of the year. Chances are the 2.7 development series will not open in 2003. Of course, all bets are off if Linus starts accepting new developments in 2.5, but chances are that will not happen.

• There will be a SourceForge crisis in 2003. SourceForge is operated by a company which is still bleeding cash, and which no longer has any real interest in free software. VA Software's investors and board are bound to question the value of the free SourceForge service. That service may well be cut back - or start demanding some sort of payment - in the coming year.

• UnitedLinux will not be enough to save all four of its participants; at least one of them will probably exit the distribution business by the end of the year. MandrakeSoft, which is in a cash crunch as of this writing, will pull through with support from its users and emerge as a viable (if smaller) company.

Those are our guesses for what this year holds for Linux and free software. These predictions are offered in the hope that they will be useful, but they come with NO WARRANTY regarding their fitness for any particular purpose or relation to any sort of reality.

Comments (2 posted)

Distribution support: how long is long enough?

[This article was contributed by LWN reader Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

Red Hat's recently announced errata policy has drawn some fire from the Linux community for being too stingy. The new policy guarantees that releases will be supported for "at least 12 months from the date of initial release." To look at it another way, it paves the way for Red Hat to end support for products only one year after release. Red Hat's 8.0 release, officially released on September 30 of last year, is slated for retirement on December 31, 2003. Fourteen months is a fairly short life cycle for an operating system, particularly since most companies and users won't be switching to a new release immediately.

An end of life policy isn't new to Linux vendors, though such a short life span is. SuSE announced last year that the company would be retiring releases after two years. Caldera and Mandrake also end support for their products after a few years, though they seem to have no posted policy stating a specific shelf life for the products.

Some have noted that Red Hat may be trying to move users to its "Advanced Server" product. While the latest "consumer" release of Red Hat is being retired at the end of this year, Advanced Server won't be put out to pasture until 2005. Naturally, Red Hat charges much more for the Advanced Server product.

When a company like Microsoft decides to end support for a product, it puts its customers in a fairly unpleasant situation: Be stranded with an unsupported platform that will no longer receive bugfixes and support for new hardware, or buck up the money for upgrades and possibly break support for older applications and face hardware upgrades. Red Hat's customers are in a different position, however, since they possess the full source to their operating system; there's nothing that says that someone else can't maintain a release past Red Hat's expiration date.

Companies that specialize in Linux support (e.g. Tummy.com, others) could provide longer-term support for companies (and individuals who happen to have the cash) for a fee. For that matter, there's no reason a savvy admin couldn't continue to patch a system on their own without official errata from Red Hat. If demand is great enough, Red Hat users might even form a community effort to release errata for older releases, though that might be more effort than simply upgrading to new releases or switching distributions. It will be some time before we see just how well, or how badly, Red Hat's policy change goes over with the Linux Community. It's likely that it will draw little attention until the expiration dates start to approach.

While many Linux users may complain about having to upgrade or scrounge for patches on their own, there is some justification for Red Hat and other vendors to stop supporting older releases. The Open Source development model moves very quickly, making it difficult for a vendor to continue support for a wide variety of packages that may put out many releases a year. Not only does the vendor need to provide updates for each package, they must ensure that the updates don't conflict with or break other packages that may depend on them. For a company struggling to be profitable while still giving away its software, it may make a large difference in the bottom line.

Comments (13 posted)

On the licensing of software patents

Unless it is changed before adoption, the proposed W3C royalty-free patent policy will allow "field of use" provisions. Patented technologies which are included in a W3C standard must be licensed for royalty-free use - but only for implementations of the the standard itself. Owners of patents can still require license payments for any other use of the technology.

What this means, of course, is that, if a W3C standard contains patented technology with "field of use" restrictions, no implementation of that standard may be distributed under the GPL. The GPL does not allow that sort of restrictions. Free implementations of such standards can be distributed under BSD-style licenses, so it remains possible to implement the standard in free software. But the range of that freedom has been restricted somewhat.

These terms make an interesting contrast with another form of royalty-free patent licensing. Companies like Red Hat and FSMLabs have licensed their patents for use in free software - but only for software licensed under the GPL. BSD-licensed implementations are not covered by these patent licenses.

If these trends continue, the proliferation of software patents is going to bring about a partial partitioning of the free software ecosystem. The two types of patent licensing are, essentially, allergic to each other, and can not be mixed. This is not a new situation - mixing free software with different licenses can be problematic even without the additional complication of patent issues. But adding in incompatible patent licensing creates new and dangerous problems.

Software patents may well turn out to be one of the more potent weapons against free software in general. Patent infringement lawsuits can be filed against any user of the allegedly infringing software, not just its developers or distributors. A couple of high-profile examples of companies being dragged into court for using a free program would serve to create a great deal of fear, uncertainty, and doubt among all free software users - even if the patent suits are eventually tossed out. The free software will have to step carefully when implementing algorithms covered by patents - and that may well not be enough.

Comments (8 posted)

Quick LWN update

The LWN staff has survived the holidays in reasonably good form. Hopefully the same is true for all of you; we wish you all the best for the new year.

Quite a few LWN subscriptions have expired over the holidays - many people, it seems, signed up at the beginning for a three-month subscription, and that has run out. If you are one of those folks, please consider renewing your subscription so you can have access to LWN's premium content and features and stay on top of what's happening in the Linux and free software community.

The final version of the LWN 2002 Linux Timeline is now available.

Enjoy the first LWN Weekly Edition of 2003, and thanks, as always, for supporting LWN.net.

Comments (7 posted)