Darkelve Posted January 10, 2005 Report Share Posted January 10, 2005 Linux & Open Source Software : 2005 in preview The year is still young and all the events that happened around Linux last year warrant a pre-view of Linux in 2005. But first, a short wrap-up of 2004. 2004 wrap-up First of all, I became a moderator for the Hardware and Workbench forum. I must say, in the short period I was able to observe this forum, it is pleasing to see how many problems from the many problems posted, are actually solved. It always gives me pleasure to mark a post with a rather complicated problem as 'Solved' (that is, if Spinynorman does not beat me to it :P ), thanks to the tireless contributions or our members. The FAQ and Tutorial section is top quality, making it easy and interesting to visit the board and solve your problem or get a response to your question. If there is interesting Linux news to share, these boards are often the first place it is posted. In short, the Mandrakeusers Community is bustling with life. 2004 saw a number of high-profile wins. Especially in the Government area. Governments are truly warming up to Open Source, the most important reasons being governments that have to balance their budget and cut costs and cutting back on license fees for software products is a tempting option. On the other hand, there are is the more ideological reason of freedom and open standards. Especially for less rich countries this is a driving force, combined with the wish to create a local software industry. For the first time since long, Microsoft products have to really compete, which can only be a good thing. Highlights: - Munich switching to Linux (LiMux); probably the project with the highest visibility - Governments in Singapore, France, Netherlands (Haarlem) switch to OpenOffice http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0...39171012,00.htm - Linux in Europe: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/06/16/linux_in_europe/ On the Linux/OSS front, there were a number of interesting events: - Novell's acquisition of SuSe and Ximian - IBM's continuing commitment to Linux, including a couple of really nice TV ads - The SCO lawsuit; while some organisations may have slowed down or even abandonned their plans to switch to Linux, the lawsuit has had the positive effect of bringing more visibility to the OS, especially in the media. - Xorg's fork of XFree, several popular distro's already adopted the new X.org, apparently without too much of a hassle. - One of the most important events of this year is, without doubt, the rise of Mozilla Firefox. Now that web access is becoming so important, Firefox makes sure websites play nice and use standards, lest they do not intend to loose 5-10% of their visitors (10% is the goal Mozilla wants to reach at the end of 2005). The initiative "Spread Firefox" has had unprecedented success, with the 2-page New York Time advertisment the icing on the cake. Firefox is replacing Internet Explorer on the Windows platform at an incredible rate. Of course it has been a long time favorite on Linux, from back when it was called Firebird (and before, Phoenix). As a side-effect, it's brother Thunderbird gets quite popular as well. - The launch of kernel 2.6, a tremendous improvement over the previous kernel. - And, of course, we have had the regular hodge-podge of distro's, functionality-wise up to par with Windows XP, with a couple surpassing its value-for-money. - A lot of much improved and new software, the process of natural selection continues. - A couple of blockbuster games ported to Linux, e.g. DoomIII and Unreal Tournament for Linux. - Attempts to create cross-distro (or distro-agnostic) installers. - A select, but important, number of software with Linux support. E.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 (beta), Skype, PcAnywhere, RealPlayer, Helix Player, ... - Mandrake is back in the black! :-) - Red Hat 'splits' its distro into the Red Hat and Fedora project, which provokes mixed feelings in the community. - the birth of the Ubuntu distro - Shy attempts to pre-load Linux on retail PC's from e.g. Mandrake, Linspire, HP. - Some hardware manufacturers make an effort to provide Linux drivers. The crown, IMO, goes to nVidia, who are able to provide drivers for Linux with comparable performance to the Windows drivers and offer a not too difficult installer. Honorable notion is for HP. ATI gets the thumbs-down. The only way I see ATI catch up in the Linux space at all is if they Open Source some of their drivers. This would be a smart move, IMO. But my guess is ATI just do not care. As you can see, 2004 has been an eventful, transitional year. My prediction is that 2005 will be such a transitional year as well, but with several important keystones for the steamroller I predict Linux to be in 2006. 2005 in preview - SCO's lawsuit will die. Either because SCO is dealt a blow in one of the court cases or because they die when their finances are drained. Most probably, there will be something to celebrate this year (the wait was long enough!). - At least 1 other high-profile Linux switch in the government - Adoption of the Oasis file format by some governments, greatly boosting Open Standards and Openoffice.org in particular. - Linux server wins will continue headstrong. There is really no stopping this. - Samba will reach version 4, which will reportedly enable it to become an Active Directory Domain Controller: http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn...012-26-NW-CY-DV If it works just as reliably as the rest of the samba code, this will prove to be a major competitive challenge for Microsoft. - Further improvements in X.org - Some freedesktop.org work will come into fruitition - Some distro consolidation in 2005 or otherwise 2006. Some distro's just will not make it and either go out of business/stop their business, other distro's might be acquired by a company or another distro ('oh, the horror!', you may think, but these things seem kind of inevitable). Mandrake acquired by HP? I think not, although this is a popular speculation. - Software: * Beagle (killer app) * OpenOffice.org 2.0/Staroffice X; this version will challenge MS Office domination by offering a complete, free/cheap alternative to MS Office. Furthermore, this version looks so promising that governments and individuals who held out on switching to OpenOffice.org last year, might well change their minds this time. And, with OpenOffice Base (replacement for MS Acess), the suite is now offers the complete spectrum MS Office offers. * Mono will go full-steam ahead, with full .net 1.0 (and maybe 1.1) support - As Microsoft is faces heavy competition, I predict at least 1 lawsuit targeting the following organisations: * Samba Team (Samba) * Novell (Mono) * OpenOffice.org organization (OpenOffice.org 2.0) - A couple of distro's will surpass Windows XP in functionality, ease-of-use and value for money and make Linux even more a viable choice for the home desktop. In particular, Linspire 5.0 may surprise some people. It has very modern components (kernel, filesystem, ...), has been under development for a long time and there'll be a surprise, something to do with mp3 (and, I am guessing, Lsongs). Be sure to watch for Desktop Linux Summit reports in the middle of February! - Game developers will slowly start to discover Linux. Expect to see some more ports of games to Linux this year. Not that I know anything concrete. However, Transgaming, in one of their newsletters, mysteriously hinted they were working on porting a couple of titles. Watch them. - Wine is slowly crawling towards a 1.0 release. Following the Wine Weekly news, this year should be the year where most applications 'just work'. CrossOver your fingers! Which reminds me that Crossover now sports near-full iTunes support. And Cedega will profit from this too, I guess. Oh yeah, and Crossover Office will provide MS Office 2003 support. - The great filesystem Reiser4 will be officially adopted by a couple of distro's - systems pre-loaded with Linux will become a little more main-stream and easier to actually buy, although these will still be shy efforts. So in my view, 2005 will be a transitional, but highly important year with lots of interesting events, if you only know where to look. It will finally start to be taken seriously as a desktop and home OS, which can only be good for competition. And for us already using Linux. (Oh yeah, and phunni will discover the error of his ways and return to using Linux ;) ) 2005 here we come! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spinynorman Posted January 10, 2005 Report Share Posted January 10, 2005 An interesting overview - definitely not feeble. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted January 10, 2005 Author Report Share Posted January 10, 2005 An interesting overview - definitely not feeble. :) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Thanks! ... more like an exercise in fun, really :) Of course these statements and predictions are all IMhO. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted January 10, 2005 Report Share Posted January 10, 2005 - The SCO lawsuit; while some organisations may have slowed down or even abandonned their plans to switch to Linux, the lawsuit has had the positive effect of bringing more visibility to the OS, especially in the media. I highly doubt this one. Someone *cough*MS*cough* will find ways to dump money into SCO's pockets, and the lawsuit (I guess you're talking specifically about the IBM one) is not showing any signs of coming to a close, although it does seem to be leaning toward an IBM win. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted January 10, 2005 Report Share Posted January 10, 2005 (edited) Nice overview! Small point: Intel gets the crown instead of Nvidia: they make their drivers even open source, so they are included on any Linux system - 3d out of the box. Sure, Intel Extreme Graphics are slow, but in terms of being a Linux player, Intel is much bigger than Nvidia. Side note: Intel has at least one whole waferfab running on Linux, Nvidia just does some of their chipdesign on Linux... Oh yeah, and intel made centrino wireless possible - works out of the box. This really beats the easiest installer. For 2005, watch preinstalled systems pick up. And from a personal note: there will be great Linux home user support (well, I'll tell you more as soon as I finish the details on that), working towards make selling preinstalled systems easier, especially for white box vendors (who just want to push boxes and not bother with support). Edited January 10, 2005 by aRTee Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted January 10, 2005 Author Report Share Posted January 10, 2005 <snip> For 2005, watch preinstalled systems pick up. And from a personal note: there will be great Linux home user support (well, I'll tell you more as soon as I finish the details on that), working towards make selling preinstalled systems easier, especially for white box vendors (who just want to push boxes and not bother with support). <{POST_SNAPBACK}> You're making me curious, aRTee! :lol: And I hope without a Windows tax ! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted January 25, 2005 Author Report Share Posted January 25, 2005 UPDATE There is an article about OpenOffice Base http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/01/25/1758245 AND a demo of Beagle! http://nat.org/demos/ At least those 2 of my predictions seem to be promising smile.gif Hmmm... I think I'll add information like this to this thread when I find it. Looks like a fun way to follow the progress and how right/wrong I was. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted February 21, 2005 Author Report Share Posted February 21, 2005 Some more updates: (dance the) Samba and (drink your) Wine! 1. Samba This one is getting old, still interesting though: Thanks to a nice read on LinuxJournal: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8069 Very interesting if you want to learn more about this project. Great extract from the article: In fact, back in 1999, companies such as Cisco discovered that their engineers had replaced NT Servers with Linux machines running Samba. These companies were alerted to the presence of Linux and Samba by IT auditors who wondered why those servers did not need rebooting. And also might be interesting: "Linux in Government: Setting Up a Linux Desktop in a Small Office Network" http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8090 2. Wine Wine is slowly crawling towards a 1.0 release. Following the Wine Weekly news, this year should be the year where most applications 'just work'. CrossOver your fingers! Which reminds me that Crossover now sports near-full iTunes support. And Cedega will profit from this too, I guess. Oh yeah, and Crossover Office will provide MS Office 2003 support. Eweek article: "Microsoft Seeks to Bottle Up Open Source Wine" http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1766843,00.asp Wine mailing list: http://www.winehq.com/?issue=262#News:%20M...ks%20for%20Wine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted February 22, 2005 Report Share Posted February 22, 2005 (edited) artee: they still won't open the darn firmware, though. Edited February 22, 2005 by adamw Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted February 22, 2005 Report Share Posted February 22, 2005 (edited) Yeah, but I thought they can't do that due to some regulations (FTC or so, I'm not familiar with that US stuff..). Basically, the firmware sets/controls the frequencies, and FTC and even European regulations stipulate that you may not sell devices that can listen to certain frequencies and such... Now, the prism chips have this stuff in a prom, you don't need to upload a firmware each time, whereas all these wireless thingies that upload the firmware each time have the channel coding accessible to anyone who knows how to manipulate the firmware. Kind of excludes any kind of open sourcing of the firmware, nothing we can do about that. Why would you want access to the firmware if they make open source and stable drivers that allow you to make full use of the hardware? This is not required (or requested, by FLOSS developers) for other hardware either, like BIOS code, graphics cards bios/firmware code, etcetc... I though the point was to have full use (full meaning: the same as under other platforms) of the hardware with stable and debuggable drivers. Which is what Intel is helping to happen... Or am I missing something? :unsure: Edited February 22, 2005 by aRTee Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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