LWN's 2020 Retrospective

Predictions are hard, as they say, especially when they are about the future. So perhaps your editor can be forgiven for not anticipating that 2020 would be the sort of year that makes one think nostalgically about trips to the dentist, waiting in a crowded motor-vehicle office, or crossing the Pacific in a row-47 middle seat. If only we had known how good we had it. Be that as it may, this year is finally coming to an end. Read on for a look back at the year, starting with the ill-advised predictions made in January.

A look back at a look forward

The first prediction had to do with the Python project finding its path in a post-Guido world. In truth, founder Guido van Rossum has not been as absent as one might have thought, and he continues to have a strong say in the development direction of the language. His championing of the PEP 622 pattern-matching mechanism shows that he still has strong ideas about where the language should go. Python governance may be happening without Guido, but the project's leaders still listen to him.

The direction of the GNU Project was the subject of another prediction that did not really pan out as expected. As far as the public can see, at least, the discussion about the future of the GNU project appears to have faded away. Richard Stallman remains in charge (as expected), but the project gives every indication of being mostly on autopilot.

The prediction about increasing retirements in the community explicitly said that little might happen in 2020, and that appears to be the case. If anything, things went the other way, with Van Rossum ending his retirement to take a new job in the industry.

Did the kernel workflow effort begin to bear fruit, as predicted? That work has continued, and the community has gained some new infrastructure for dealing with patches outside of email. The ripest fruit at this point, certainly, is the b4 tool, which continually gains capabilities and has become an increasingly indispensable part of many developers' workflow. One wonders how we did without it, but it only showed up (under a different name) in January.

Your editor predicted that the next LTS kernel would be 5.9, released on November 1. There were some weasel words about how, if there were fewer ten-week cycles, that kernel would actually be 5.10, released in December. And, in fact, kernel releases got a little faster in 2020, 5.9 was released on October 11, and the long-term-support release for 2020 will be 5.10, which came out on December 13. So this prediction is a win — as long as the fine print is taken into account.

A prediction that there will be conflict within the Debian community is relatively safe in any year, 2020 included. Attacks on Debian from outside the community may have fallen off a bit, but Debian developers are good at creating their own heat. This can be seen, for example, in ongoing disagreements about vendoring and, of course, init scripts.

As predicted, the kernel community did come close to finishing its work to address the year-2038 problem, though some loose ends remain. It just goes to show that if you predict something often enough you may eventually be able to claim victory. Another prediction was that BPF API issues would not go away. They arguably have not, but neither did they play a large role in the discussions of 2020. The one exception was perhaps this libbpf issue which isn't really an issue in BPF itself. Meanwhile, BPF development continues at a furious pace.

Were there "perturbations in the employment market" as predicted? Obviously, labor markets as a whole have had a difficult year, but it seems that the market for free-software developers was mostly shielded from all of that. Social distancing and working from home come naturally to us, and the technology industry as a whole had a good year.

What was missed

Overall, it is fair to say that your editor's record as a mediocre predictor of future events has not improved in 2020. But failure here isn't just a matter of predicting things that did not happen; there's also the little problem of not predicting things that did come about. Needless to say, there's a few of those to make fun of as well.

One surprise, despite being arguably predictable, was Red Hat's decision to end support of CentOS as we know it in favor of "CentOS Stream". There have been worries about what Red Hat would do with CentOS ever since the acquisition, given that there are clear incentives to end the free ride that CentOS has been for so many users. The hard part with such predictions is always in the timing; it's hard to tell which straw will break the camel's back.

A similar story played out in the LibreOffice community, where Collabora moved LibreOffice Online into a separate, Collabora-branded project. Once again, a company putting significant resources into a free-software project has felt the need to make changes in order to get a sufficient return on that investment. Happily, Collabora Online remains free software, but it lives outside of the LibreOffice community, for now at least.

The death of email in 2020 was not predicted, and it did not happen. But the movement of projects away from email-centered processes was predictable and did continue. Debian debated a move to Discourse, and Fedora continues to move discussions in that direction, for example. Not everybody agrees that these web-based systems are an improvement over email, but there is pressure to move in that direction regardless.

That other story

Then, there is that one other little surprise. Some comfort can be taken in the fact that few others predicted that the world would be thoroughly disrupted by a global pandemic, even though the first reports were showing up by the time the predictions article was written. Over the year, the pandemic has brought a few interesting things to light.

It is worth pointing out, for example, that as soon as discussion of contact-tracing apps took off, a consensus formed that these apps should be open source. Given the sensitive nature of the information handled, the need to be able to inspect the operation of contact-tracing apps and ensure that privacy was protected was easy to see. We have, over the years, raised some awareness of that advantage of free and open-source software, it seems.

Of course, weather and solitaire apps can still follow your every move and report everything back to the mothership. Oh well.

One other thing is worth a mention. Free software famously built the Internet. When in-person meetings became an unwise thing to do, there was an immediate, pressing need for the Internet to support activities like video conferencing, and the free-software community had no real answer to give. There are good video-conferencing applications, and many of us put them to good use this year, but there was nothing that could work on the scale needed. Thus, even free-software companies — and free-software events — ended up depending on highly proprietary platforms, some of which are not necessarily designed with privacy or freedom in mind. This was a huge missed opportunity; free software, it seems, is still far from world domination.

We were certainly hurt by the end of in-person conferences; they are necessary for the smooth functioning of our global, electronically connected community. That situation seems likely to continue well into 2021. But how did the pandemic affect the development of the code? One way of answering that would be to point out that two of the three busiest kernel development cycles ever happened in 2020. Another way would be this set of plots:

The upper plot shows a count of patches merged into the mainline kernel by the date they were posted; the lower one counts by commit date instead. The shaded areas indicate the merge windows. If there is any signal to be seen there at all, it suggests that activity may have picked up ever so slightly during the peak of the lockdowns in March and April. Certainly there is no decline in activity over the course of the year. The pandemic continues to cause untold grief and harm worldwide, but it has been relatively gentle with the development community.

In the same vein, the community has been gentle with LWN. At the beginning of the pandemic it was hard indeed to predict how things would go and easy to fear the worst. At the end of the year, LWN's staff is healthy, and so is its financial footing. We can only offer our deepest thanks to all of you who have supported us over the years, and who continued to support us through this difficult year as well, many at higher levels than before. You all are the reason LWN has been here since 1998.

We wish the best of the holidays for all of our readers and a happy beginning to what will hopefully be a better year than 2020.

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