LWN's unreliable 2014 predictions

ARM-based server systems will hit the market, and those systems, naturally, will be running Linux. In the process, they will highlight no end of entertaining conflicts between the buttoned-down server space and the rather looser ARM world; the advent of ARM servers will also bring ARM developers closer to the core kernel, where they have had a relatively small presence thus far.

In 2013, we got a confirmation that some of the more paranoid people among us were correct: the Internet is indeed being used for widespread surveillance. In 2014, we will learn how bad the situation really is as ongoing revelations show the extent of the surveillance efforts — and the fact that this activity is not even remotely limited to one often-named US agency. The world is full of nosy agencies, both governmental and otherwise, and many (or most) of them have been taking advantage of technology in any way they could.

Awareness of free software as a tool against surveillance will increase, but it will also become clear that free software is not anywhere near enough. Free software provides a modicum of assurance that it is not operating contrary to its users' interests, but that assurance falls down if the software is not closely reviewed, and the sad truth is that we often have fewer eyeballs on our code than we would like to admit.

There is also the little problem that, increasingly, the hardware that our software is running on cannot be trusted. Contemporary hardware, at all levels down to that of simple memory chips, is running software that is invisible to us; that software can be subverted by any of a number of agencies. Even those who are in favor of NSA surveillance (and such people certainly exist) would do well to pause and think about just where much of that hardware and invisible firmware comes from.

Some possible good news is that progress may be made in the fight against patent trolls this year. The economic costs imposed by trolls have become so widespread and indiscriminate that cries for reform are being heard throughout the US, which is the primary venue in which these entities operate. The US Supreme Court will have an opportunity to restrict software patents this year. To believe that the problem will be solved in 2014 would be recklessly optimistic, but, with luck, the situation will be better at the end of the year than it is at the beginning.

The Debian project will resolve its init system debate early in 2014. Whatever conclusion the Technical Committee comes to will be contentious at best; this does not appear to be an issue around which a strong consensus can be formed. If the Committee can explain its reasoning well enough, the project will pick itself up and move on; most people realize that not every decision goes the way they would like. A poorly considered or overtly political decision would create far more strife, but, given the people involved, that outcome seems highly unlikely.

Predicting the actual decision is rather harder. Your editor suspects that systemd may be chosen in the end, perhaps with a decision to make some Debian-specific changes, but would be unwilling to bet more than a single beer on that outcome.

There will be significant challenges for Android in 2014. Alternative mobile platforms, including Sailfish OS, Tizen, Firefox OS, and Ubuntu will all ship during this year; at least one of those may well prove to be a viable alternative that acquires significant market share. The heavily funded Cyanogen Inc. also has the potential to shake things up in the coming year, should it ever decide what it intends to do. Meanwhile, Google's attempts to maintain control over the platform and concentrate functionality into the proprietary "Play Services" layer will sit poorly with manufacturers and some users. Android will remain a strong and successful platform at the end of the year, but it will be operating in a more competitive market.

ChromeOS will have a good year, building on the surprising success of Chromebook systems — 21% of all notebook systems sold — in 2013. The traditional desktop can be expected to continue to fade in importance as it is pushed aside by systems that, while seemingly being less capable, are able to provide useful functionality in a simple, mobile, and relatively secure manner. The down side of this trend, of course, is that it pushes users into company-controlled systems with central data storage — not necessarily a recipe for the greatest level of freedom. The creation of an alternative system that can achieve widespread adoption while more strongly protecting privacy is one of the biggest challenges our community faces.

The fundamental question of what is a Linux distribution? will continue to attract debate. Some people are unwilling to even see something like Android as a proper distribution, but the diversity of systems running on the Linux kernel will only increase. Lamentation over the twilight of "traditional Unix" will continue, but that will not stop the countless numbers of people who are doing ever more interesting things with Linux.

On the filesystem front, Btrfs will start seeing wider production use in 2014, finally, though users will learn to pick and choose between the various available features. XFS will see increasing use resulting from the growth in file and storage sizes, along with Red Hat's decision to use it by default in RHEL 7. 2014 may just be the year when the workhorse ext4 filesystem starts to look like a legacy system to be (eventually) left behind. Ext4 will still be the most widely deployed Linux filesystem at the end of the year, but it won't be the automatic default choice that it has been for so many years.

The kernel community has never really had to worry about attracting new developers, but new kernel developers may become harder to find in 2014. Kernel development is getting harder to get into, and the level of contributions from unpaid developers has been falling for years. An environment where an understanding of Documentation/memory-barriers.txt is increasingly necessary is going to be off-putting for a lot of potential developers, who may just decide to focus on JavaScript applications instead.

For years, LWN's annual predictions have included a statement to the effect that our community, along with the software it creates, would be stronger than ever come December. That prediction, at least, has always proved accurate. There is no reason to believe that things will be any different in 2014. We are looking forward to telling you all about 2014 as it happens; thanks, once again, to all of our readers who make another year of LWN possible.