A 2017 retrospective

Your editor led off with a prediction that group maintainer models would be adopted by more projects over the course of the year; this prediction was partly motivated by the Debian discussion on the idea of eliminating single maintainers. Debian appears to have dropped the idea; Fedora, meanwhile, has seen some strong pushback from maintainers who resent others touching "their" packages. Group maintainership may have made a few gains here and there, but it has not yet succeeded in taking over the free-software world.

The prediction that the vendor kernels shipped on Android devices would move closer to the mainline was not a complete failure. Google has made some efforts to push vendors toward less-ancient kernels, and efforts to get those vendors to work more closely with the mainline are beginning to bear fruit. It will be a long and slow process, though.

There is no easier way to come up with a safe prediction than to suggest that security problems will get worse. Sure enough, we had plenty of vulnerabilities at all levels. What the prediction arguably missed was the increasing number of vulnerabilities turning up at the level that most of us consider to be "hardware". The Intel management engine problems are perhaps the highest-profile vulnerabilities of this type that turned up in 2017, but they aren't the only ones. There are clear indications that more issues of this type will come to light in the near future. What we think of as "hardware" is increasingly made up of software with all of the problems that afflict software at higher levels.

A related prediction said that the free-software community's security story would improve over the course of the year. That has certainly come true; we have seen an increase in development on hardening technologies, use of fuzzers to find vulnerabilities, and so on. We have a long way to go, but things are heading in the right direction.

With regard to the disintermediation of distributions: your editor has noted an apparent increase in applications that can only be installed by way of language-specific package managers or some sort of container system. There appears to be momentum behind technologies like Snap or Flatpak, and some distributions appear to be working to disintermediate themselves. The role of distributions remains strong for most Linux desktop and server users, though, and that won't change anytime soon.

And yes, as predicted, we're tired of hearing about containers, but we're far from done on that front.

Beyond that, the predicted ruling in the VMware GPL-infringement suit has not yet come out. Protocol ossification remains an issue, and it is pushing the net toward new protocols that can masquerade as old protocols. Thus, for example, QUIC now accounts for a significant fraction of Internet traffic thanks to its use in the Chrome browser. See also this article (discussed on LWN in December) on how various other protocols are changing. Meanwhile, as predicted, the kernel community is coming to a better understanding of the changes required to perform properly on systems with persistent memory which, we're told, will be widely available sometime soon, honest.

LWN in 2017 and beyond

In 2017, LWN put out 50 weekly editions containing 258 feature articles written by LWN staff and 91 articles from 26 outside authors. We had coverage from 25 different conferences this year, for which we would like to acknowledge the Linux Foundation which, as LWN's travel sponsor, made all of that conference coverage possible. This support has been made available with no strings or even hints that we should cover certain events, and we appreciate it.

This year saw the first significant reorganization of the LWN Weekly Edition since 2002. Some readers clearly like the new arrangement; others are ... less pleased. Running all of our feature content when it's ready (rather than burying it in the edition) seems like a clear improvement. The organization of the edition itself probably has not found its final form, but we don't really know what that final form might be yet. That will take a while (and probably some additional staff) to work out. Which leads to the final topic...

One of the things we did not foresee in 2017 is the sad demise of Linux Journal, which has been covering our community since the earliest days. That publication joins a long list of others — The H, NewsForge, KernelTrap, LinuxWorld, Kernel Traffic, NTK, Linux Gazette, RootPrompt, Linux Action Show, LinuxDevices, Linux Voice, and so on — that are no longer active. The publication market is a challenging place to be, even if you're not trying to keep up with a fast-moving, geographically dispersed, highly technical community like ours. Many who have tried to run a free-software-oriented publication have failed to thrive in the long run.

LWN, happily, is still here and is not in danger of going away. We will not be announcing a pivot to video anytime soon. Things could always be better, of course, but LWN is on solid financial ground, thanks to you, our readers, who have continued to support us for all these years. Our biggest problem, instead, is staffing. It takes a lot of effort to keep an operation like LWN going, and we are short-handed; we would still very much like to hire additional writers/editors to work with us. If anybody knows somebody with skills in this area, please encourage them to contact us.

Meanwhile, we'll muddle along into 2018 — the year in which LWN will celebrate its 20th anniversary. We wish the best of holidays for all of our readers and look forward to rejoining you after the new year. It is an honor to write for such an audience, and we thank you all for staying with us.