Some unlikely 2021 predictions

With luck, the world will emerge from the depths of the pandemic this year. In many ways, the effects of the pandemic on the free-software community were relatively minor, so it is to be expected that the recovery will not change much either. We will continue to create great software as always. The recovery may mean, though, that we can start meeting in-person later in the year, which is important for the long-term health of our community. That said, many people will likely remain reluctant to travel, and companies may discover a reluctance to pay for a return to travel. So many of our meetings will have, at least, an online component for the entire year.

The other thing that may happen, though, as the world opens up, is a conclusion by some in our community that life is too short and precarious to spend it tied to a keyboard. It would not be surprising to see retirements increase over the course of the next year or two.

Support for CentOS 8 will end at the end of the year; users will have to transition to CentOS Stream or find another solution altogether. For all the screaming, CentOS Stream may well turn out to be good enough for many of the deployments that are currently using a stable CentOS build. Others are likely to find that, in this era of cloud computing, a long-term-stable distribution isn't as important as it used to be. If the "machines" running the distribution will not last for years, why does the distribution they run need such a long life? The end of CentOS could have the unintended effect of undermining the demand for ultra-stable "enterprise" distributions in general.

There will be attempts to recreate CentOS as it was, of course; most or all of them are likely to fail. Maintaining a stable distribution for years takes a lot of work — and tedious, unrewarding work at that. CentOS struggled before Red Hat picked it up; there is no real reason to believe that its successors will have an easier time of it. The fact that the alternative with the most mindshare currently, Rocky Linux, has no publicly archived discussions and only seems to communicate on the proprietary Slack platform is also worrisome.

For better or for worse, the Fedora project has a well-established relationship with Red Hat. The status of openSUSE is nowhere near as clear, which is one of the causes of the ongoing strife on its mailing lists over the last year. OpenSUSE will need to better define its relationship with SUSE in 2021, even if additional stresses, such as the creation of the independent openSUSE Foundation or the rumored public offering by SUSE, don't happen. Like Fedora, openSUSE is the descendant of one of our earliest and most influential distributions; it will be with us for a long time yet, but exactly how that will happen needs to be worked out.

It will become possible to submit kernel patches without touching an email client — but few people will do that in 2021. The kernel community will, eventually, be dragged into more contemporary ways of doing development. The kernel project's current processes are there for a reason, though; few other projects have anything near the kernel's developer or patch counts. Some significant thought will have to go into making "modern" development processes work at kernel scale. As has happened in the past, the result may be innovations that are felt far beyond the kernel community.

The commercial side of BPF will become more prominent in 2021. BPF, which allows code to be loaded into and executed within a running kernel, has been growing rapidly in power and adoption over the last several years. This year, we'll see how companies are using it to build their products and services. BPF makes it much easier to add interesting functionality to the kernel, but it also serves to keep code implementing that functionality separate from the kernel source. Our systems in the future may be more flexible and capable, but they may also thus be a bit more proprietary, even if all the code is ostensibly free.

GNOME 40 will bring a new shell interface (described here). It's a GNOME interface change, so a fair amount of loud complaining is inevitable; people had finally started to make peace with the current GNOME shell, after all. And yes, it will be GNOME 40 rather than GNOME 3.40.

Python developers will have to think hard about the future of the language. The Python 3.0 release happened twelve years ago now, and most of the angst over moving from Python 2 is behind us. There is a reasonable case to be made that, to a great extent, the Python 3 language is "done" and need not continue to undergo significant change. On the other hand, proposed features like structural pattern matching show that some developers still have an appetite for big changes. One can safely predict that there will be no disruptive Python 4 release anytime soon; what is harder to predict is when developers wanting stability will start to put the brakes on attempts to continue to evolve Python 3.

Software supply-chain attacks will be a serious threat for the community this year. The SolarWinds attack, which was used to compromise a number of US government agencies, was carried out by slipping the malware payload into a routine software update. We can read this SolarWinds blog entry from 2019 with amusement; it claimed that open-source software makes one's chance of downloading malicious software "much higher". That post has not aged well, but this attack could also happen with free software, which is distributed in binary form through a large number of trusted channels. Malicious code inserted into one of those supply chains could be used with devastating effect; we can only hope that the suppliers we trust are truly trustworthy.

Antitrust enforcement against companies like Facebook and Google in the US and Europe will pick up in 2021. The long-term result of these efforts could be huge, and not necessarily good or bad for our community, but the glacial pace of the courts will keep anything serious from happening this year. Being under the antitrust microscope may make those companies, which are significant contributors to the free-software community, more circumspect in their actions, though. If a software contribution could look like an attempt to further entrench a monopoly, it may just not happen.

OpenStreetMap will continue to grow in importance as companies realize that it provides the best way to compete with Google Maps. As a result, welcome resources will pour into the project; indeed, it would appear that corporate-sponsored contributions are already the majority of the edits going into the OpenStreetMap database. Inevitably, there will be clashes with the hobbyists who built OpenStreetMap up from the beginning, but the end result should be good for everybody involved. As with software, free data is better when everybody works to improve it.

Through all of this, Linux and free software will just be stronger at the end of 2021. That trend has held for decades, through economic crises, terrorist attacks, a pandemic, the dotcom crash, and more; predicting its continuation should be a safe thing to do.

Finally, these predictions will be reviewed and duly mocked in the December 23, 2021 LWN Weekly Edition — the other half of this tradition of ours. That is a small part of our larger mission of reporting from within the free-software community — a tradition that is about to begin its 24th year. Certainly none of us predicted that back at the start, but it is safe to say we'll still be at it when the year ends. As always, many thanks to all of you who have supported our work for all of these years; you are the reason that we are still at it. Best wishes to all LWN readers for a safe and rewarding 2021.