A 2009 retrospective

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It's that time of year again: 2009 is coming to a close, so it is time for your editor to return to his ill-advised predictions made in January and see how things went. As usual, it's a mixed bag; some predictions went better than others. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day - at least for those of us old enough to remember analog clocks - so your editor could hardly be expected to get everything wrong. But he tried.

The first prediction was that free software would emerge from the economic mess stronger than ever. Whether anybody has truly emerged from this crisis is a bit of a controversial subject; it may be a while before we really know. But it is already clear that this prediction hit the mark. Companies dealing in free software are generally doing well, and developers are having a much easier time finding jobs than many others. The dot-com crash was hard on our community; this time around has not been a whole lot of fun, but we're coming through it in good form.

A related prediction was that open embedded systems would grow in appeal, and that Android, in particular, would do well. Android's success seems no longer to be in doubt; it is showing up on a wide variety of devices. Truly open systems are still rather more scarce than one might like, though handsets like Nokia's N900 are a nice step in the right direction. What we are seeing, in any case, is that even closed devices are quickly opened up by their customers; sometimes it seems like the industry isn't even trying all that hard to stop device liberation anymore.

Your editor thought that there would be fewer GPL enforcement actions this year. Without taking the time to do a proper count, your editor thinks that happened, though the new round of BusyBox suits announced in mid-September made that conclusion less clear than it would have otherwise been. But, as seen by Bradley Kuhn's successful project to find a new GPL violation every day, respect for our licensing remains far from universal.

The fear that a formerly friendly company might go to the dark side and follow the SCO path hasn't been realized - so far. On the other hand, your editor didn't even bother to predict that SCO itself would be gone by this time; one wonders if that story will ever really come to an end.

Rather cynically, your editor said that we still would not know about the 2008 Fedora break-in. Apologies are due for that one: the Fedora project posted its report at the end of March. There are still unanswered questions, naturally, but this report is as complete as could have been expected.

On the prediction that the 2.6.33 kernel would be released: does 2.6.33-rc1 count? Probably not. At this point, the kernel seems to have settled pretty firmly into a three-month development cycle; that's unlikely to change in the near future. On the other hand, the prediction that the numbering scheme would not be changed proved to be correct.

"The realtime patch set will be mostly merged by the end of the year." Oh well.

"3D graphics will be a solved problem." That was a bit on the optimistic side, but we are getting much closer. The big problem in the future is not going to be 3D in general, but graphics chipsets used in mobile platforms in particular.

On the other development-oriented subjects: the "make or break year" for Perl looks mostly like another year of stasis for Perl; the Parrot 1.0.0 release does not appear to have brought a lot of new energy to this project, but neither is Perl fading away. KDE 4 has indeed stabilized, and GNOME 3 is indeed coming into focus. People are still debating distributed version control systems, and more projects are making the switch. On the other hand, Go-oo notwithstanding, it's hard to say that OpenOffice.org has truly been forked.

There is one other important thing to do when reviewing predictions: evaluate what was missed altogether. Predictions which are always right, but which fail to anticipate the truly important events of the year are of limited utility. So, with that in mind, one might well ask: what did your clueless editor miss entirely back in January?

Arguably the item at the top of the list would have to be the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which had been in trouble for some time already. Since Sun claims to be the world's largest contributor to free software projects, any change of control must be an important event. In this case, the proposed acquisition of Sun by Oracle has put an important free software project (MySQL) into play as various parties try to either use it to affect regulatory acceptance of the acquisition or, instead, use the regulatory process to gain some degree of control over a post-acquisition MySQL. It is not a pretty picture, but it does demonstrate the sort of importance that free software projects can attain in the wider world.

While your editor predicted success for Android, the announcement of ChromeOS came as a bit of a surprise, despite long-lived rumors that Google was going to get into the Linux distribution business.

Your editor certainly wishes he had gone on record with a prediction that Microsoft would become a contributor to the Linux kernel. Such a prediction would have certainly drawn a number of skeptical comments; ah, what joy it would have been to post "I told you so" responses to those. Alas, your editor was not that on top of things. But, then, it appears (again) that Microsoft's time as a kernel contributor might be short.

Finally, something that really should have been predicted was the increasing focus on identifying and discouraging behavior which discourages people from joining (or remaining part of) our community. We have seen a number of discussions resulting from ill-considered comments by high-profile people, the imposition of codes of conduct, and more. There can be no doubt that the atmosphere in many of our public spaces is seen as hostile by many talented people we would like to have as contributors. There also can be no doubt that we will drive away contributors with excessive criticism of community members whose comments are seen as unwelcome or heavy-handed conduct enforcement schemes. Finding a balance which works for the community as a whole is going to be a long-term project.

With that, your editor wishes the best of holidays and year-end festivities for all LWN readers. LWN traditionally does not publish an edition in the last week of the year - there is usually not much happening anyway - so we will not be back until January 7, when we will resume our normal publication schedule and your editor will return with another set of doomed predictions. Many thanks to all of you for supporting LWN through another great year.

