Some unreliable predictions for 2015

We will hear a lot about the "Internet of things" of course. For larger "things" like cars and major appliances, Linux is the obvious system to use. For tiny things with limited resources, the picture is not so clear. If the work to shrink the Linux kernel is not sufficiently successful in 2015, we may see the emergence of a disruptive competitor in that space. We may feel that no other kernel can catch up to Linux in terms of features, hardware support, and development community size, but we could be surprised if we fail to serve an important segment of the industry.

We'll hear a lot about "the cloud" too, and we'll be awfully tired of it by the end of the year. Some of the hype over projects like OpenStack will fade as the project deals with its growing pains. With some luck, we'll see more attention to projects that allow users to own and run their own clouds rather than depending on one of the large providers — but your editor has often been overly optimistic about such things.

While we're being optimistic: the systemd wars will wind down as users realize that their systems still work and that Linux as a whole has not been taken over by some sort of alien menace. There will still be fights — we, as a community, do seem to like fighting about such things — but most of us will increasingly choose to simply ignore them.

There is a wider issue here, though: we are breaking new ground in systems design, and that will necessarily involve doing things differently than they have been done in the past. There will certainly be differences of opinion on the directions our systems should take; if there aren't, we are doing something wrong. There is a whole crowd of energetic developers out there looking to do interesting things with the free software resources we have created. Not all of their ideas will be good ones, but it is going to be fun to watch what they come up with.

There will be more Heartbleed-level security incidents in 2015. There are a lot of dark, unmaintained corners in our software ecosystem, many of which undoubtedly contain ancient holes that, if we are lucky, nobody has yet discovered. But they will be discovered, and we'll not be getting off the urgent-update treadmill this year.

Investments in security will grow considerably as a consequence of 2014's high-profile vulnerabilities, high-profile intrusions at major companies, and ongoing spying revelations. How much good that investment will do remains to be seen; much will be swallowed up by expensive security companies that have little interest in doing the hard work required to actually make our systems more secure.

Investments in other important development areas will grow more slowly despite the great need in many areas. We all depend on code which is minimally maintained, if at all, and there are many unsolved problems out there that nobody seems willing to pick up. The Linux Foundation's Critical Infrastructure Initiative is a good start, but it cannot come close to addressing the whole problem.

Speaking of important development areas, serious progress will be made on the year-2038 problem in 2015. The pace picked up in 2014, but developers worked mostly on the easy part of the problem — internal kernel interfaces. But a real solution will involve user-space changes, and the sooner those are made, the better. The relevant developers understand the need; by the end of this year we'll know at least what the shape of the solution will be.

Some long-awaited projects will gain some traction this year. The worst Btrfs problems are being addressed thanks to stress testing at Facebook and real-world deployment in distributions like openSUSE. Wayland is reaching a point of usability for brave early adopters. Even Python 3, which has been ready for a while, will see increasing use. We'll have programs like X.org and Python 2 around for a long time, but the world does eventually move on.

There has been some talk of a decline in the number of active Linux distributions. If that is indeed the case, any decline in the number of distributions will be short-lived. We may not see a whole lot more general-purpose desktop or server distributions; that ground has been pretty well explored by now, and, with the possible exception of the systemd-avoidance crowd, there does not appear to be a whole lot to be done in that area. But we will see more and more distributions that are specialized for particular applications, be it network-attached storage, routing, or driving small gadgets. The flexibility of Linux in this area is one of its greatest strengths.

Civility within our community will continue to be a hot-button issue in 2015. Undoubtedly somebody will say something offensive and set off a firestorm somewhere. But, perhaps, we will see wider recognition of the fact that the situation has improved considerably over the years. With luck, we'll be able to have a (civil!) conversation on how to improve the environment we live in without painting the community as a whole in an overly bad light. We should acknowledge and address our failures, but we should recognize our successes as well.

Finally, an easy prediction is that, on January 22, LWN will finish its 17th year of publication. We could never have predicted that we would be doing this for so long, but it has been a great ride and we have no intention of slowing down anytime soon. 2015 will certainly be an interesting year for those of us working in the free software community, with the usual array of ups, downs, and surprises. We're looking forward to being a part of it with all of you.