A 2018 retrospective

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The December 20 LWN.net Weekly Edition is the final one for the year; as usual, we will be taking the last week of the year off for a brief rest. LWN, which is about to conclude its 21st year of publication, has had the time to build up some traditions, one of which is a year-end retrospective that evaluates the predictions we made back in January. As usual, some of those predictions aged rather better than others; read on for our report card.

Revisiting the predictions

We started with a vague prediction that there would be an increase in introspection as we think about what our projects and our industry should be trying to achieve in the world. On the industry side that has certainly happened; technology companies have lost their halo and find themselves under increasing levels of scrutiny, and some have had to change course as a result. Whether that process has extended to the free-software community is debatable, though. Some actions, such as the removal of the questionable Speck encryption algorithm from the kernel, show concern about the world we are creating, but there aren't a huge number of examples to point to.

The prediction that we would see more hardware vulnerabilities was published before the disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, so we could perhaps claim a major success there. By January 2, though, when that article was published, it was obvious that something of that nature was about to surface, so the amount of credit that is due is limited. Whether the level of interest in open hardware has increased as a result is not really clear. The RISC-V architecture has indeed seen such an increase, but that may be more a result of commercial forces than security concerns, and whether RISC-V processors will truly be more secure has yet to be proven.

Concerns about a major security incident at a cloud provider were not realized — so far as we know. Even the various rounds of hardware vulnerabilities appear to have been handled well enough. Serious security breaches continued to surface elsewhere, of course, to nobody's surprise.

Work on alternative container runtimes continued as predicted, as did blockchain hype; no surprises there. The collapse in the prices of many cryptocurrencies and the lack of other convincing blockchain applications suggests that some of the shine has come off of some blockchain-based technologies, though.

The prediction that vendors would move closer to mainline kernels was a bit controversial at the time, but things do indeed seem to be moving in that direction. The Android project, in particular, is working hard to make that happen. We are still some distance from being able to run mainline kernels on our mobile devices, but there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Did alternative kernels like Fuchsia gain prominence this year? That may or may not have happened, but those projects have certainly not gone away. It is still true that Linux developers take our domination of small, embedded systems for granted; they can be heard saying that no vendor will want to bother qualifying another kernel for its hardware. Perhaps that is true, but perhaps that is the pride that goes before the fall in that piece of the market.

Wayland support did grow as predicted, but "the long reign of the X Window System" seems far from an end. It probably is true that Python 3 adoption has reached a turning point; those who are still running Python 2 applications are generally thinking seriously about moving forward.

What was missed?

One thing that was certainly missing from the list of predictions was that Linus Torvalds would take a one-month break from running the kernel project and a new code of conduct would be adopted. This change came out of the blue, and has caused quite a bit of controversy both within the kernel project and beyond it. Even developers who have no particular disagreement with the code that was adopted are somewhat unhappy with the way that change came about. So far, though, the sky has not fallen, and kernel development continues pretty much as it did before.

Perhaps Microsoft's rebasing of its Edge browser on top of the Chromium engine could have been foreseen, but we didn't see it coming. The result is a browser ecosystem that increasingly looks like a monoculture, with all of the associated risks. Due to some of the forces mentioned above, the company that now appears to control much of the web (and beyond) is not quite as well trusted as it once was. Once again, Firefox is our main line of defense against this scenario; perhaps the project can come through for us again.

The era of big-money stock deals involving Linux seemed to have ended with the dotcom crash, but then IBM surprised the world by buying Red Hat for $34 billion. It could well be that Red Hat will bring value to IBM that far exceeds the massive premium above the company's valuation that IBM agreed to pay. Or maybe we are seeing another occasion where history rhymes with itself, and an over-the-top valuation of a free-software company is the harbinger of the end of a long, technology-driven boom.

The creation of new free-software licenses has been frowned upon for many years, so one might be forgiven for thinking that innovation in this area had stopped. This innovation resurfaced this year, though, as companies created new licenses intended to increase their incoming revenue from their flagship projects while keeping those projects as something that at least vaguely looks like free software. It is fair to say that these new licenses have gotten a chilly reception, but it is probably also fair to say that this will not stop companies from trying to craft licenses in ways that will improve their bottom line.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and almost nobody expected Guido van Rossum's abrupt abdication, in July, of his role as the benevolent dictator for life of the Python project. As a result, the project was unprepared for this change and spent the last six months figuring out how its governance will work going forward. Python the language has never been stronger; Python the project is in no danger, but its developers clearly have some things to work out.

All told, it would be hard to argue that this was not yet another good year for Linux and free software — like the years before it. LWN has been privileged to enjoy a ringside seat for 21 years of this community's growth. We owe this privilege to an engaged and supportive community of readers; no publication could ever ask for a better audience. As this year comes to a close, we would like to thank you all for your continued support of LWN, and to wish you the best of the holiday season, however you may celebrate it.

