And so ends another year...

Another longstanding LWN tradition, of course, is to look back at our beginning-of-year predictions and to mock them mercilessly. Predictions, as they say, are hard, especially if you can't manage to get everybody to conveniently forget them before they can be proved wrong. Still, your editor was not entirely off-base back in January.

The first prediction was that 64-bit ARM-based servers would hit the market in 2014. That one was looking a bit uncertain for a while; these things always seem to take longer than one thinks they should. But, happily, HP came through at the end of September with its "Moonshot" offering. The associated prediction that ARM kernel developers would start to work more in the core kernel code is a bit harder to verify; there may be some movement in that direction, but the pace is glacial. For the most part, ARM developers seem happy to remain in their own subarchitecture-specific playgrounds.

Did we learn how bad the surveillance situation really is, as was predicted in January? That is, of course, impossible to verify (one might argue that this is the best kind of prediction). Your editor's sense, though, is that we still haven't learned about all that is going on, and that there will continue to be unpleasant surprises in the coming year. Addressing the related prediction: it does seem that awareness of free tools like Tor has grown. We are seeing the development of open-source whistleblower tools like GlobaLeaks and SecureDrop. Projects like the Open Wireless Router launched, but did not necessarily gain the success that their founders may have hoped for. It is certainly still true that the majority of computer users still do not understand how free software helps to defend their freedom in a highly networked world.

This year's predictions mentioned the fact that hardware is increasingly hard to trust. The appearance of BadUSB in August would appear to have borne that one out. This was an easy prediction, of course; in the end, our hardware is mostly software, so it will perforce suffer from the problems associated with software.

Was progress made against patent trolls as predicted? The answer would appear to be a cautious "yes." There were some encouraging rulings from the US Supreme Court, and there has been some evidence that the higher standards for "obviousness" are making themselves felt. As layoffs at Intellectual Ventures show, it is perhaps not the best time to be a patent troll. That said, the patent problem is far from solved; this is an issue we will have to stay on top of for many years yet.

With regard to Debian's init system debate, your editor was at least correct in saying that the project would choose systemd. The prediction that the issue would be resolved "early in 2014" proved to be sadly mistaken, though. What we have here is a failure to see just how divisive this question would be within the Debian community. Most distributions making the switch went through the seemingly obligatory mega-thread on their mailing lists, then made a decision and got on with life. There appears to be a substantial minority contingent within Debian that has no interest in getting on with life, though. Things have calmed down for now, but one should not look for predictions of continued calm from this direction.

Your editor predicted significant challenges for Android in 2014. In December, that prediction can safely be called a dismal failure. Android seems stronger and more unassailable than ever; even well-funded alternatives like Tizen do not appear to be going anywhere interesting. That is unfortunate; Android is a great system, but some serious competition might inspire it to become greater yet.

According to this report issued in July, Chromebooks account for 35% of all notebook sales. That is a surprising level of success that backs up the prediction that ChromeOS would have a good year.

As predicted, there was substantial debate on what makes a proper Linux distribution, with an emphasis on concerns over increasing divergence from "traditional Unix," whatever that could be said to be.

Btrfs, the predictions said, would start seeing wider production use in 2014. It is true that openSUSE 13.2 now uses Btrfs by default and takes advantage of the filesystem's features in some interesting ways. On the other hand, projects like CoreOS are looking hard at moving away from Btrfs after running into too many problems. Even people who warned that Btrfs would take a while to mature are, at this point, surprised at just how long it really is taking. The fact that Btrfs development seems to have slowed in recent months is worrisome as well. There is a real possibility that, by the time Btrfs is truly "ready," the world will have moved on to other solutions and forgotten about it.

Finally, we predicted that new kernel developers would become harder to find. Quantifying that situation is hard, but it is clear that the market for these developers remains robust. The fact that a substantial portion of new kernel developers are already employed by the time they get their first patch accepted suggests that companies are increasingly having to train developers themselves.

Beyond the Debian fiasco, what did your editor miss entirely this year? Arguably one of the more important issues in 2014 was the return of Big Security Issues. This was, after all, the year of "goto fail," Heartbleed, Shellshock, the as-yet unnamed NTP vulnerabilities, and numerous reports of large companies having their networks compromised with, usually, the disclosure of millions of credit card numbers. In many cases the actual vulnerabilities were quite old, but this is the year in which they were made public. It is fair to say that more people had to directly confront the consequences of security failures than have in recent years. Your editor would not dare to predict that this experience will create a greater awareness of security issues in the future, though.

A couple of other notes

Way back in 2002, we thought long and hard about whether we should add comments to LWN. We feared the worst, that trolls and others would turn the comment areas into vile cesspools and bring down the quality of the site in general, but, in the end, we added the feature anyway. For years, it seemed that our fears were unfounded; comments on LWN were generally polite and interesting.

It is difficult to be so upbeat about the experience at the end of 2014, though. Things have reached a point where we literally hesitate to post news items in certain hot-button topic areas for fear of the long and heated comment threads that will follow. Most LWN commenters do their best to remain polite and informative, but there are some clear exceptions. This year, for the second time in the site's entire history, we had to start deleting comments from one persistent, sock-puppet troll who would not get the message. That is not a step we take lightly and not something that is fun in general.

If we could ask for a holiday gift from our readers, it would be this: could we all please make an effort to improve the nature of LWN comments in the coming years? Asking trolls to stop is, of course, a pointless exercise, but the problem goes well beyond that. There are quite a few people out there with strong opinions about specific issues who feel the need to repeat their arguments, multiple times, often in marginally related conversations. Maybe we could all take the position that, once we've said our piece, there's little value in repeating it? Could we try harder to keep personal attacks out of the comments? Let us all try to reduce the noise a bit and let the signal shine through.

Finally, on a personal note: needless to say, I did not predict being diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening disease this year. I would like to thank all of you for both your support and your discretion in not making this whole thing an ongoing big deal on the site. I am pleased to announce that, some cleanup activities aside, I have just completed the rather unpleasant course of treatment prescribed by the doctors. Only time will tell for sure, but all of the indications at this point suggest a good outcome. 2015 will be a year of getting back into life and the community; I can hardly wait.

Special thanks are due to the LWN staff for keeping things running seamlessly during the times when I was otherwise occupied. Suffice to say they are all looking forward to a well-earned week off.

From all of us at LWN, best wishes to all of our readers for an outstanding holiday season and a great new year. You all are the reason we are here, and your support makes it all possible. We cannot adequately express our gratitude; we could not wish for a better group of people to write for and to share a community with.