Looking forward to 2010 [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
January 5, 2010

Your editor, not generally known for his good sense, has long made a tradition of putting together a set of Linux-related predictions at the beginning of each year and posting them for the world to see. There is no particular source of inside knowledge behind these predictions, and no real reason to give them more credence than is merited by much of the material found in one's spam folder. Still, it's a fun exercise in pondering how things could go and trying to guess what the important themes will be.

On that note, here's your editor's thoughts for 2010. Any relation to reality is purely coincidental.

Open hardware platforms will be seen as increasingly important by the general public. Anybody who saw Verizon's heavy advertising campaign for its Android-based "Droid" offering will have understood that openness is now seen as a selling point in the mobile phone market - something which was not true even a year or two ago. Apple has done us a favor by showing how painful a restricted platform can be - even if it is a relatively open one. Future offerings, including the much-hyped "tablet" machines, will be judged by many criteria, one of which will be "who decides which applications I can run on it?" Locked-down systems will suffer as a result of their closed nature.

We'll see a number of Linux-based tablet computers offered to the market this year. What may take a bit longer to see is just what all of these machines will really be good for.

Software patents will strike close to home again. Nokia's suit against Apple is an especially ominous development. We are seeing the opening of a whole new computing market where none of the traditionally dominating companies have a commanding share. So it's a bit of a gold rush, and some companies will undoubtedly rush to gain their gold by way of the courts.

Copyright assignment policies will be debated by numerous projects over the course of the year. In the past year, the (attempted, in-progress) acquisition of MySQL (by way of Sun) by Oracle has clearly shown how assignment of copyrights to a corporation can go wrong, and Canonical's imposition of an assignment policy has created a backlash of its own. Even Eben Moglen, who has argued for copyright assignments in the past, has stated publicly that MySQL would be better off with a more diverse ownership structure. Developers in the future will think harder about signing assignment agreements, and projects will wonder whether their interests are truly best served by imposing assignment agreements. Copyright assignment agreements will not go away, but, like heavy-handed trademark policies, they will come to be seen an an impediment to freedom which is often counterproductive.

Speaking of MySQL, Oracle's acquisition of Sun will proceed without the imposition of major changes by the European Union. Regardless of its long-term plans, Oracle will treat MySQL with a light hand in the coming year. There will almost certainly be attempts to fork the project, though, regardless of how Oracle behaves.

The browser war will heat up again, but the main contestants will be free software. Firefox holds a commanding position, but its heavy weight and long startup time are enough to push some users to the competition - which, increasingly, looks to be Google's Chrome. If Google continues to develop the browser, and continues to avoid fatal errors like disallowing ad blocking extensions, Chrome may hold a significant part of the market by the end of the year.

Solid-state storage devices will come into wider use this year, with some interesting results. For example, the above-mentioned long startup time for Firefox tends to just vanish when the browser is SSD-based. Wider use of SSDs will tend to hide lazy or inefficient application development, but it will also put more pressure on the kernel's block subsystem, which will struggle to keep up with rapidly-increasing operation rates.

Adventurous distributors will be offering Btrfs by the end of the year. The filesystem will be feature-complete and stabilizing, but it will still be very much for adventurous (and well backed up) users at that point. Ext4, instead, will be moving beyond community distributions and into "enterprise" production use.

The big kernel lock will be gone from the mainline kernel. Actually, it will probably remain in a number of places, but things will have reached a point where a lock_kernel() call is an indication of old, unmaintained, and unused code. On any reasonably current hardware, a leading-edge kernel will be able to run with no BKL use at all. This work will be part of the larger job of getting the realtime preemption patch set into the mainline, but your editor dares not attempt another prediction on when that task will be complete.

Production use of LLVM will be on the rise as this compiler matures and stabilizes. Some of the most interesting uses are likely to be in nontraditional projects like Unladen Swallow.

There will be a scary security incident involving mobile Linux devices. Our security is pretty good, but it's far from perfect; just think, for example, about the number of bugs likely to be found in wireless network drivers, which are quite complex and reviewed by relatively few people.

Speaking of security, 2010 will be the year of the sandbox. Technologies like SELinux, AppArmor, and TOMOYO will not be going away, but increasing numbers of people will decide that many security objectives are more easily obtained by just placing at-risk processes into their own box.

There will be lots of talk of clouds, with companies stumbling over each other to become the host for some portion of our lives. Your editor can only hope that, at some point, this rush toward highly centralized services will be countered by a push for personal control of data. Perhaps members of our community will make it easy for nontechnical users to set up "cloudlets" for individual or small-group use, with a focus on individual control and portability.

GNOME 3 will be released. Learning from the KDE 4 experience, the GNOME developers will promote their work less and focus more on not breaking things for users. The result will be a launch which draws relatively little attention, of either the good or the bad variety, but which lays the base for the platform's future development.

Developers will start using Python 3 as that language becomes more widely available in community distributions. By the end of the year, a small number of Python 3 programs will be in reasonably wide use. Meanwhile, we'll still be waiting for Perl 6.

Community distributions will grow in commercial importance over the course of the year. Distributions like Debian and Gentoo already show up in surprising places, with prominent organizations choosing them for their combination of stability, broad software selection, and great support. More companies will begin to realize that the "enterprise distribution" model is not perfect for all situations and will go looking for solutions which bring them closer to the communities which create all of that software in the first place.

Linux and free software will be stronger than ever at the end of the year. Yes, your editor makes this prediction every year, but it has proved rather more reliable than most of the others. It makes sense to go with a known winner, and, in any case, this prediction is easy to justify. The software keeps getting better, the community gets larger, and the value of free software is becoming more widely understood. There doesn't seem to be any reason for any of that to change anytime soon.

to post comments

Waiting for Perl 6?

Posted Jan 5, 2010 23:45 UTC (Tue) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link] (8 responses)

We've released a new (and always improved) versions of Rakudo Perl 6 on schedule, every month, for the past 24 months. We plan to release Rakudo Star (a "useful implementation of Perl 6") in April. Why wouldn't we continue to meet our goals and deliver what we promise?

Waiting for Perl 6?

Posted Jan 6, 2010 0:23 UTC (Wed) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link] (5 responses)

I guess you must have missed the opening paragraph with the disclaimer.

These are a "predictions", unless you believe in destiny, you have a hand in whether they come true or not.

Waiting for Perl 6?

Posted Jan 6, 2010 0:33 UTC (Wed) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link] (4 responses)

A disclaimer is scant justification for poor research.

I can't follow the logic. Python 3 will see more adoption as distributions pick it up, but Rakudo Perl 6 (which is already in distributions such as Fedora 12) won't come out? How does that work?

Waiting for Perl 6?

Posted Jan 6, 2010 0:44 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

You're saying I didn't research, say, this article - which I posted?

One can certainly accuse me of being overly cynical and snide; it wouldn't be the first time. But please don't tell me I don't know about stuff I posted myself.

Perl 6 may, after all these years, surprise us; in that case, I'll take my lumps in December when all of these predictions are reviewed. Or it may turn out to be another waypoint, a demonstration release which is not, yet, to a point where developers want to use it. My own sense is that it may take a bit longer yet - but, as has been noted, I'm often wrong.

It wouldn't be the annual predictions if I didn't find at least one set of toes to flatten. My apologies for having found yours with my steel-toed sandals. I've cranked out my share of Perl code over the years and appreciate your work.

Waiting for Perl 6?

Posted Jan 6, 2010 1:08 UTC (Wed) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe I'm overly sensitive, but I read the prediction as disbelief that we will actually release a piece of software. I stand by our history of doing exactly that.

You are welcome to complain about the pace of development, the paucity of developers (or other resources), the choices we make as to what to develop and when, or anything else -- but the continued ontological debates over whether Perl 6 actually does (or actually will) exist is awfully tiresome.

If you mean something other than "Will it actually come out?", I will happily retract my criticism as a knee-jerk complaint based on a hasty misunderstanding.

Waiting for Perl 6?

Posted Jan 6, 2010 3:11 UTC (Wed) by akumria (guest, #7773) [Link]

I read the prediction that, despite releasing, there will not be a significant uptake of Perl 6.

Waiting for Perl 6?

Posted Jan 6, 2010 0:46 UTC (Wed) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link]

How about: we will see ?

The author mentioned he predicts some python 3 applications in reasonably wide use, while he obviously doubts that for perl 6. As like previous years, this is what he predicts for 2010, at the end of the year he will go through his list and see what he nailed and what not.

No need to be upset, if you have your own predictions, feel free to post them on a forum too.

Waiting for Perl 6?

Posted Jan 6, 2010 1:03 UTC (Wed) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]

> Why wouldn't we continue to meet our goals and deliver what we promise?

He was talking about Perl 6 the language, not Rakudo Perl 6 the implementation. The language design hasn't stabilized yet and some people, myself included, are not willing to venture far from the safety and familiarity of Perl 5 until Perl 6 is declared ready. There are parts of the language that could still change in the meantime, so I'm not willing to invest much effort in using it for anything other than satisfying my curiosity about what is to come.

Waiting for Perl 6?

Posted Jan 6, 2010 12:37 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (guest, #2582) [Link]

You are talking about Linux 2.5. Jon is talking about Linux 2.6. (Or, if you prefer, FreeBSD-CURRENT versus FreeBSD-RELEASE or -STABLE.)

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 0:51 UTC (Wed) by Narkov (guest, #58516) [Link] (12 responses)

Johnathan - what is with writing all the stories in the second person? "Your editor"..etc. I really don't understand why you do it this way as it's a real turn off for me.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 0:54 UTC (Wed) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

Your present commentator interprets the cited practice as just part of Jon's winningly arch writing style.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 1:19 UTC (Wed) by Per_Bothner (subscriber, #7375) [Link] (3 responses)

To be pedantic - it's third person, not second. ("You" is second person, but "your editor" is third person.)

I suspect our editor has a thing for Miss Manners, who writes in a similar style (which I also like).

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 4:22 UTC (Wed) by dankohn (guest, #6006) [Link]

This commenter suspects that our editor was more influenced by the (British,
and arch) writing style of the Economist than by Miss Manners.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 14:20 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

As long as we're being pedantic, I think his name is Jonathan (the same as mine), not Johnathan.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 16:42 UTC (Wed) by blitzkrieg3 (guest, #57873) [Link]

Meh, I think it's a bit smug.

George Carlin said it best

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 7:08 UTC (Wed) by eparis123 (guest, #59739) [Link] (1 responses)

what is with writing all the stories in the second person? "Your editor"..etc.

I really like it; it's a trademark of LWN's amazing writing style.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 8, 2010 12:51 UTC (Fri) by Quazatron (guest, #4368) [Link]

I was going to upvote you, but then I realized this is LWN.
I like it, it adds credibility to the posts.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 7:42 UTC (Wed) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (1 responses)

I like this style too - it's refreshingly traditional in this age of instant comment and analysis, and it aligns with the considered approach of LWN writing generally.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 9, 2010 21:05 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

I completely agree. I like it a lot.

third-person

Posted Jan 6, 2010 12:15 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

It's a rather standard journalistic style, common in dead-tree media since
forever, as opposed to a bloggish style common online.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 15:22 UTC (Wed) by schutz (subscriber, #3760) [Link]

I am a not a big fan of "me too" comments, but I would not like to miss an opportunity to congratulare the LWN staff: I really enjoy their writing style, including (and especially) the "third person" way of writing.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 7, 2010 6:15 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link]

It is likely not Jon's goal to turn you on. Just saying

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 0:58 UTC (Wed) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link] (2 responses)

They all look pretty safe and boring. So what are your long shots?

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 3:03 UTC (Wed) by gbailey (subscriber, #58) [Link] (1 responses)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 sometime this year?

KVM gaining market share at the expense of Xen or VMware?

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 17:10 UTC (Wed) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link]

Those aren't long shots. A long shot is Xen dom0 support getting into the mainline kernel, something I would have predicted to happen last year.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 2:25 UTC (Wed) by josefwhiter (guest, #39238) [Link] (1 responses)

Fedora has been shipping BTRFS as an install option since F11, you just have to pass icantbelieveitsnotbtr to the installer. In F13 you just have to pass btrfs to the installer.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 10:08 UTC (Wed) by rogerwhittaker (subscriber, #39354) [Link]

openSUSE 11.2 also offers btrfs, but with a strong "health warning"
when you choose it for a filesystem during the install.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 8:01 UTC (Wed) by SimonKagstrom (guest, #49801) [Link] (21 responses)

I would not be surprised if the next year would become the year of Android (in some ways I guess you can say that 2009 was that already). I think Windows Mobile, Palm, Maemo and Symbian will have tough times ahead of them.

One could just hope that the kernel work for the various Android phones would target mainline more.

Disclaimer: I've been wrong before :-)

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 8:18 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (13 responses)

Hopefully.

The two major problems with Android on mobile phones are:

* The parties involved in the hardware and telephony radio have extremely pro-proprietary outlook on the world and really try to do everything they can to fight against the trend of cheaper and more generic hardware we see in the personal computer market. They want to be a Apple and not a Dell. This is going to continue to be a huge kick in the balls for people coming from a OSS Free Software background.

* Due to the lack of desire for handset makers to keep up to date Android firmware available for their phones then the more Android handsets you see out there the more various different Android versions developers and users are going to have to deal with. They want to use newer and improved software to compel consumers to buy new hardware... so providing newer versions of Android to existing users is totally counterproductive from their perspectives. In other words: If they offer Android 2.1 upgrade for a phone currently running Android 1.x then that totally eliminates a major reason why a customer will want to buy a new phone. It's much better to blow through development as quickly as possible and get the software out in the shortest time and move on to the next device then it is to bother doing things like getting drivers upstream. If you are not paying them money for a new handset then you are nothing to them so they are not going to lift a finger to help out with third party development.

Both of these things are going to be large roadblocks to Android's continued success. Compared to Apple, who retains tight control over the hardware and will offer OS upgrades for older handsets as long as the hardware can support it. It will be interesting to see how Google is planning on dealing with these issues and how the 'Nexus One' is going to help them do it.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 13:53 UTC (Wed) by Zenith (guest, #24899) [Link] (1 responses)

This could be turned around to a selling point:
- We provide updates to older phones!

While not as flashy as "look, we have the newest and shiniest phones", it is hopefully a sales point worth mentioning.

But granted, this only affects the buying process, and does nothing to capitalize on existing users.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 14:50 UTC (Wed) by SimonKagstrom (guest, #49801) [Link]

I hope it will be. I've just recently bought a Samsung Spica (I believe it's called Moment in the US), and whether it will get upgrades is still a matter of speculation and rumors.

Unfortunately, as Drag says there is not much incentive for Samsung and other phone producers to upgrade software for existing phones. The Apple Iphone is obviously much better in that respect, perhaps since Apple get revenue from owners that buy apps and itune songs. Not like that with Android.

Of course the best thing would be if the devices were open enough for people to modify the installations by themselves.

I took a look at the kernel source code for the Samsung Spica by the way, and unfortunately it very much looks like a hack to get the phone out in time - much of it would be quite difficult to get mainlined. Still, Samsung seems to be moving in the right direction at least.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 16:43 UTC (Wed) by gnb (subscriber, #5132) [Link] (8 responses)

>They want to use newer and improved software to compel consumers to buy new
>hardware...
Certainly true from the handset maker's pov, but in places where it's common
for the carrier to subsidise the handset and make back the money on the
contract software upgrades seem quite attractive as a way of keeping
customers happy (and hence paying) without spending all that money on new
hardware. So they have an incentive to apply pressure for handsets to be
supported at least for some number of updates.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 17:54 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (7 responses)

The carriers use handset subsidies as ways to lock people into 2 year
service contracts, which are much more lucrative and attractive to creditors
then month by month payments.

(If you can guarantee to people that you will have a X amount of dollars in
a given time period that lowers the cost of obtaining more investment and it
changes how things are accounted on the books)

So, no. Carriers think they benefit from this upgrade train also.

Now in reality a happy customer is a paying customer. If they have a
positive feel and think they get good benefits from your service they will
naturally be more loyal and be willing to spend more money... but this is
not how a typical American executive thinks.. They are consumers and not
customers and your job is to just milk them for all they are worth.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 18:51 UTC (Wed) by Zenith (guest, #24899) [Link] (6 responses)

You are not allowed to lock people into 2-year contracts everywhere, though. In Denmark 6 months is the maximum for private persons, while business can be locked for 1 or 2 years I think it is.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 20:00 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (5 responses)

No carrier in the USA forces anybody to do anything. People volunteer for it since they can do things like get a 600 dollar phone for 200 dollars. Once you agree to a contract then it's a contract.

If you don't want to do that you can just pay monthly rates and buy phones at full retail price. It's just not that normal to do that. Most people just assume that you have to sign a contract; but that is mostly because carriers don't promote monthly plans and people are too lazy to do research on their own.

Usually most carriers you can choose 'pay as you go' (aka prepaid plans), 'monthly contract', or 1-2 year contract.

Usually it's not worth it to do prepaid unless you only use your phone rarely. Probably monthly makes sense for most people that buy their phone at full retail.

It's not to the point were you can run into any store and buy a disposable SIM card just yet (you can, but it's not common), but as the economy declines and people cut back on luxury spending then it'll probably be more like Europe.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 20:20 UTC (Wed) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link] (2 responses)

If that's true, why don't I get a discount on a plan for buying my own phone without a subsidy? Why isn't the subsidy (more like a lease) a separate line item on the bill? Why can (and do) phone companies arbitrarily increase termination fees for existing customers?

That's not fair-and-square assistance with getting the phone. That's MBA-begotten corporate malfeasance, and it ought to be illegal.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 20:49 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

T-mobile's new plans give an ~$20 discount if you don't have a subsidised phone.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 21:52 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I really don't care personally.

The way fees add up and the costs of the company is not really clear cut.

It is certainly cheaper, as I partially pointed out above, to have people in long term contracts even though they may pay the same amount of money as a person with a monthly contract.

Also one of the big deals about selling a subsidized phone is that the carrier installs restrictive and custom firmware on it. These firmwares are designed to 'encourage' users to use services that cost extra.

So in that way customers using custom firmwares are more profitable then customers using retail. So that is another reason for the subsidy that is not going to show up in when you compare rates.

If you want to do government action on it then more laws is not the answer. The only reason wireless carriers are able to be assholes to their customers is because the USA government has handed over monopoly access to the most useful parts of the radio spectrum.

Any significant amounts of regulation is not going to hurt them or help you one bit. Instead what it is going to do is raise the barrier of entry for competing companies; therefore allowing these corporations to get away with being even bigger assholes.

I work in a heavily regulated industry so I know for a fact that is what happens. The corporations are so heavily regulated that they pretty much do whatever the fuck they want with no serious repercussions. If any of these companies ever decided to leave the market then the government would be completely screwed... why? Because there is nobody stupid enough with millions and millions of dollars and years of time to blow on building a infrastructure that can meet the requirements the government has set up. It's now impossible for any new corporation to enter the market so the existing ones can do pretty much anything they want as long as it's not blatantly illegal.

As far as cell phone carriers go if you make this sort of behavior illegal they will just find some other way to screw people over. And you know what the catcher is? People volunteer for it. From what I can tell most people overwhelming prefer to get into 2 year contracts. Who are you to say that they are not allowed to do this if they want to? Why should they not be able to trade some liberty for cheap smart phones?

The best way you can do things is talk with your cash and convince others to agree with you. That is a lot more effective way to control the corporations then your votes are to control the government. And if you want to have more control then tell the FCC to open up the radio spectrum and get rid of the DRM-ish restrictions on radios.

Android

Posted Jan 7, 2010 23:51 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> No carrier in the USA forces anybody to do anything. People volunteer for it since they can do things like get a 600 dollar phone for 200 dollars.

Same in Europe.

> Once you agree to a contract then it's a contract.

Merely signing a contract is not enough to make its content legal. If some country decides for consumer protection that phone contracts can never, ever be longer than 1 year, then you can sign whatever you want and legally cancel the contract after 1 year. I guess that's what Zenith meant about the 6 months limit in Denmark.

Although at a much different money scale, such a consumer protection law is similar to... forbidding subprime loans: a very strange idea implemented in some European countries.

Android

Posted Jan 8, 2010 17:31 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

But aren't there common products in the US that are offered only with 2 year commitments? ISTR AT&T/Apple sell their i-phone that way.

I think the laws in the US differ on the ability to have long term phone service contracts. I know for a while at the beginning of the wireless phone era, in California it was not possible for a consumer to commit to any phone service at all in exchange for a handset.

BTW, I think it's misleading to view it as getting a $600 phone for $200. Even California sales tax law doesn't look at it that way -- the sales tax due is based on a $600 selling price (CA sales tax applies to hardware, but not phone service). The healthy way to look at it is as a phone service bundle that includes a handset and 2 years of service, with a $200 upfront payment and the rest spread over 2 years. As opposed to buying them separately, which involves a $600 initial outlay.

I'm not entirely sure why companies that offer month-to-month service demand the same monthly price as for the bundle, but it may be because they expect service prices to go down over the next two years and it may be because they expect customers to switch around and it costs lots of money to re-acquire a customer. IOW the commitment itself is worth $400.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 22:24 UTC (Wed) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

Those are hardly the only major problems with Android on mobile phones. Here's your most damning summary, a presentation on the subject by Matt Porter, shown at Embedded Linux Conference Europe. Tidbits from it:

Non-standard replacement from glibc (Bionic, derived from BSD)
No pthreads
No SysV IPC
No real kernel-headers, just "scrubbed" headers that require tortuous workarounds.
No udev, and instead something really wacky hacked into init (no hotplug)
HAL substitute, vold, has problems with USB mass storage
Other USB support is sometimes also problematic on account of input-device hacks

There are lots of other reasons cited why Android is poorly maintained and portable only with difficulty.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Android

Posted Jan 8, 2010 18:49 UTC (Fri) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]

> Compared to Apple, who retains tight control over the hardware and will
> offer OS upgrades for older handsets as long as the hardware can support
> it.

Don't forget that Apple is also a hardware vendor, and it's in their best interest to have you purchase new hardware as often as possible.

Android

Posted Jan 6, 2010 13:34 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (6 responses)

I would bet for Maemo instead. It was already a great platform for the N770, with all its warts; it got better for the N800 and the N900 seems to be a winner. Pros: mature, standard software, Debian package format, power management, healthy community. Cons: many proprietary bits, poor usability sometimes.

Anyway it's kind of a win-win situation for us, since both are Linux-based and both are reasonably open (and willing to open even more).

Android vs Maemo

Posted Jan 6, 2010 13:49 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (5 responses)

Android has a much larger mindshare than Maemo. It runs on devices from
multiple vendors (predominantly HTC and Motorola), and it benefits from
marketing not only by Google, but also by multiple phone carriers. (At least
in the US.)

Maemo is all-Nokia, and is pretty much unheard-of in the US. Even Nokia
itself hasn't have much mindshare in the US anymore, though it had more a
decade ago.

I'm sure the story is different in Europe though.

Android vs Maemo

Posted Jan 6, 2010 16:01 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes, here Nokia has a lot of market share in the traditional mobile market. Not so much in smartphones, but the N900 might change that. It is not popular yet though.

Android vs Maemo

Posted Jan 6, 2010 18:17 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

In the USA market Nokia is not so hot, but in the world smartphone market
Symbian phones still outsell pretty much everybody else combined.

Maemo may have a chance world-wide, but in the USA it has a low chance of
success in the foreseeable future.

Android vs Maemo

Posted Jan 6, 2010 18:19 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

As an interesting data point, here's a usability survey of ten smartphones. At #2 on the list was the iPhone; #1 was the N900. The best Android phone came in at #5. To say that the survey is unscientific is to be charitable, but it's still perhaps worth a look.

Android vs Maemo

Posted Jan 6, 2010 19:09 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I wouldn't know about scientific -- but I so love my n900. I haven't even
coded for it or anything yet, but the apps are lovely, the keyboard is
much better than the n810's, connectivity is great -- and, of course, and
xterm with ssh is much nicer than putty on the E72.

Android vs Maemo

Posted Jan 14, 2010 13:07 UTC (Thu) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

Maemo is no longer all-Nokia. Mer is the generic version of Maemo, which has separated out the
Nokia-specific parts. I'm not quite sure how much hardware is currently supported, but certainly
SmartQ is one and others are in the pipeline (openmoko, airgoo and maybe balloon if I get my
finger out).

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 10:37 UTC (Wed) by smadu2 (guest, #54943) [Link] (6 responses)

"Apple has done us a favor by showing how painful a restricted platform can be" - apart from being closed source, what is so painful about apple ? People dont seem to mind and actually like iphone - the app store is selling 250 apps per sec.

the problem is Apple's app store censorship

Posted Jan 6, 2010 11:57 UTC (Wed) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link] (2 responses)

The problem has been Apple's rigid but confusing management of the App
approval process. It has been a source of confusion for app writers who
have to cross their fingers when they make a submission and is becoming
increasingly true for consumers when they see apps on Android that will
never get released on the iPhone as it would compete with Apple's own
software.

the problem is Apple's app store censorship

Posted Jan 6, 2010 13:59 UTC (Wed) by zander76 (guest, #6889) [Link]

Not to mention try doing any type of size optimization to your executable on an iphone and its security layer will make sure it never runs. Such a pain since they also have an over the air limit of 10 meg.

the problem is Apple's app store censorship

Posted Jan 11, 2010 16:13 UTC (Mon) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

But the flip-side is that it is one of the only phone platforms where developers can earn their living with relatively simple (sometimes too simple) applications. On many other platforms you may get away with navigation or office software, but I guess not much more than that...

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 13:56 UTC (Wed) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (1 responses)

The fact that a lot of ordinary people jailbreak their iPhones shows that
openness is something that they at least want - it's not that easy to
jailbreak since Apple keeps closing the loopholes, but there's a lot of
demand for DIY and commercial jailbreaks.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 16:22 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

For the people that I know that use their iPhone the ability to jailbreak it
is a requirement for making the phone useful. This may not be typical, but
certainly eliminating the troublesome restrictions creates a huge increase
in the utility of the thing.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 11, 2010 2:37 UTC (Mon) by dmag (guest, #17775) [Link]

> what is so painful about apple ? People dont seem to mind

If Apple had enforced a straightforward apps policy, you'd be right. There would only be a small fringe grumbling about the fact that "Apple has too much control over iPhone apps". The 'gilded cage' that iPhone users are in would have been completely invisible to them.

Instead, millions of people got introduced to the concept that "Apple controls your iPhone".

- Apple decided to de-list some approved apps and delete the app off of people's phones.

- Apple rejected the app of a popular band with millions of fans, (worse, Apple changed their minds and approved the app because of the protests. This caused people dig up more dirt on the "Apple has too much control" story.)
http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?59,651569

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 6, 2010 13:56 UTC (Wed) by zander76 (guest, #6889) [Link]

Slackware takes over the world.. :)

Sandboxing - already here

Posted Jan 7, 2010 15:25 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]

I agree that there will be *more* sandboxing. In many ways that is happening already. The first version of SELinux with Fedora didn't work well, because it tried to constrain everything. Now, SELinux imposes relatively few constraints on many apps; instead, for a few specific applications it creates a much more constrained environment when the app is run, and I would call that a sandbox too.

Looking forward to 2010

Posted Jan 7, 2010 21:14 UTC (Thu) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link]

My predictions for 2010:

* As the Fedora 14 features are decided, we'll see that Fedora will get another desktop environment added, and a few hundreds of new packages, and yet another programming language. Fedora users will therefore see, almost by definition, a decline in average quality of Fedora packages, and they'll spend more time in updates by yum, use an even slower Fedora bugzilla, etc.;
* GNOME 3 will be released, but it will still lack a slogan, a catch phrase, a three line summary, etc. that allows users, and even developers, to finally see the point of GNOME 3. (Full disclosure: I'm a small time contributor to GNOME);
* the SCO saga will implode; no one will pick up their (its?) non-physical assets (copyrights, whatever) to continue SCO's futile legal fight: those assets are basically worthless by now;
* None of the major non-commercial distributions will decide to focus on a subset of the many things they try to do now (ie, they will not decide: "We'll only do $DESKTOP for $ARCH0, $ARCH1, and $ARCH2).

Rip TTY layer to get rid of BKL?

Posted Jan 15, 2010 15:48 UTC (Fri) by cybernytrix (guest, #5727) [Link] (5 responses)

Regarding the BKL, the TTY layer seems to be one of the biggest culprits. Shouldn't it be possible to simply rip out the entire TTY layer from the kernel and spawn GNU screen to handle all the TTY multiplexing and other issues? What is the point of having the TTY layer in the kernel?

Rip TTY layer to get rid of BKL?

Posted Jan 16, 2010 14:17 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (4 responses)

No hope. GNU screen *relies on* the TTY layer, to be specific it's utterly
dependent on the proper function of PTYs. PTYs are, guess what, a kind of
TTY. The TTY layer's design (wired into countless apps nowadays and
required by POSIX) is a pretty typical example of BSD braindamage, in that
it has a horrendously incestuous relationship with critical parts of the
kernel's visible API, including things that are very hard to push out to
userspace, like the process relationship graph (process groups, sessions,
setsid()) and signal handling (SIGTSTP/SIGCONT, SIGTTIN/SIGTTOU, SIGINT,
special rules for delivery of signals to session leaders, and so on...)

But perhaps the concept of a line discipline and all that it implies can
eventually be ditched (it's used for pppd these days, but what else?)

Rip TTY layer to get rid of BKL?

Posted Jan 16, 2010 16:13 UTC (Sat) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (3 responses)

It's possible to get rid of the BKL because FreeBSD 8.0 did it.
Extract of the release notes :

"The FreeBSD TTY layer has been replaced with a new one which has better support for SMP and robust resource handling. A tty now has own mutex and it is expected to improve scalability when compared to the old implementation based on the Giant lock".

Rip TTY layer to get rid of BKL?

Posted Jan 17, 2010 13:36 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

You misunderstand. I wasn't saying that it was impossible to get rid of
the BKL (or to rewrite the entire TTY layer, although that would be
horrible). What I was disputing was that it was possible to replace the
TTY layer with something in userspace, and that GNU screen would be of any
particular help there.

Rip TTY layer to get rid of BKL?

Posted Jan 17, 2010 22:06 UTC (Sun) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

You're right. My answer was for cybernytrix.

Rip TTY layer to get rid of BKL?

Posted Jan 18, 2010 11:38 UTC (Mon) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

Also, FreeBSD already dropped line discipline support. Kernel-based ppp (and pppd), already obsoleted due to userland ppp(8) being better in pretty much every aspect, was dropped earlier, so it wasn't an issue.