The end of the year edition
In this week's issue of Linux.Ars, we bring to you a recap of the past year's activity, its successes and failures, in the *nix and open source world.
This past year has been quite eventful in the open-source and *nix world. The greatest advances in the *nix world in 2004 have been in the realm of the desktop. Very shortly before the start of the year, Linus released kernel version 2.6.0 to the world, bringing substantial improvements to interactive and throughput-oriented performance alike, vaster support for hardware devices and new and improved features to Linux users. This was closely followed by rapidly improving support for mobile technologies such as IEEE 802.11g (54 Mbit/s wireless LAN) devices and the Centrino IPW2000 series wireless devices. Distributions were quick to pick up the new releases, with SUSE, Fedora and Mandrake leading the way with SUSE 9.1 and 9.2, Fedora Core 2 and 3 and Mandrake 10.
Speaking of distributions, Sun and Novell introduced their corporate offerings ? the Java Desktop System and the Novell Linux Desktop respectively. Mark Shuttleworth (of Thawte fame) and his company Canonical released Ubuntu Linux, a new Debian-based distribution that has rocked the Linux desktop world.
Desktop technologies broke much new ground in 2004, with the release of GNOME 2.6 and 2.8 and KDE 3.2 and 3.3. In particular, GNOME made many advances, including support for the spatial metaphor in its file manager, Nautilus; many improvements in the GTK+ widget toolkit, including a much-improved file selection dialog box; an enhanced file types/associations system; and integration of Project Utopia components to allow for much smoother hardware detection and integration. KDE added, among much functionality, more and faster eyecandy, enhanced hardware support (configuration and monitoring), improved functionality and integration in the browser/file manager and integration of secret management. Both added much PIM functionality and greatly improved their accessibility support.
Desktop frameworks also saw much advancement. A licensing debate among the members of the XFree86 Project led to a change in the license of the new XFree86 4.4 release, which was deemed to be unfriendly to open source. As a result, X.org, the organization responsible for the X Window System protocol and interface standards and reference implementation, forked the last source code released under the traditional MIT/X11 license as the official X.org distribution of the X Window System, Release 11. The year saw Releases 6.7.0, 6.8.0 and 6.8.1. X11R6.8.0 heralded mainstream support for various extensions to the core protocol enabling much new functionality ? the newly-introduced Xfixes, Composite and Damage extensions and the associated xcompmgr and transset tools resulted in a new wave of screenshots showing off translucency/alpha blending and drop shadow effects.
Desktop applications also saw much development. The Mozilla Project released the 1.0 releases of the explosively popular Firefox web browser and Thunderbird mail user agent. Additionally, Evolution, GNOME's Mail User Agent, saw its 2.0 release and applications such as Rhythmbox, JuK, Totem, Epiphany and K3B made great strides in functionality and ease of use alike.
Retailers like Wal-Mart increased their shipments of PCs preloaded with Linux; they added JDS systems to their existing Lycoris- and Linspire-based lineup and recently started shipping a US$498 laptop loaded with Linspire. This, coupled with several governments deciding to increase their use of Linux-based computers, has seen the mindshare of Linux and open source climb further during the past year.
The good must be taken with the bad; partly because of Linux's greater visibility, SCO targeted its users in several lawsuits despite damaging losses in the courtrooms. However, Novell and other vendors announced their preparedness to indemnify their customers in case of legal action and Novell, owner of several UNIX copyrights, has demonstrated the frivolity of these lawsuits.
On the development side of things, the Mono Project saw its first release followed by an eager release of new tools and frameworks. In particular, the Mono project has been enthusiastically integrating with the GNOME Project, enabling GNOME applications to be quickly and efficiently written using the Mono runtime environment. Dashboard and Beagle are two applications written using the .NET framework targeting Mono that look very promising for rich content indexing and lookup for the desktop. Sun released the Java 5 runtime and software development kit, advancing the functionality and features available on that platform further. Fluendo contributed to the development of the GStreamer framework, hiring on many core developers, as well as funding the development of Vorbis and Theora.
Relatedly, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD all saw new releases emphasizing security and performance, and Sun's Solaris 10, slated to be released under an open-source license, is eagerly awaited.
The coming year appears to be full of promise indeed. The rapid development and release of technology last year is rapidly being picked up by open source developers all over the world and is already starting to pay dividends in terms of better performance and functionality. 2005 will be very interesting to watch.
The best and worst of 2004
This issue of Linux.Ars is a special one. We bring you the best (and worst) of 2004 in the Linux and Open Source community. We wanted to be "fair" with our end of year awards, so we asked the denizens of Linux Kung Fu their thoughts on some categories that are relevant to the open source world. Our hope was to bring you a non-biased view of current events in the Linux world. We hope that this gives support to those who deserve it and motivates others to improve.
The voting was of course a field of great contention, but we feel that the results reflect the diverse opinions of a very original and passionate community here at Ars. So, without further ado, let's take a look at who garnered the acclaim and who was just lame.
Contributor of the year
This is the individual who has made the biggest contribution to the Linux Community, resources, advocacy, and code. This category is not developer specific. It can be any person, but it has to be one individual.
As you can well imagine, this was one of the most contentious fields in the poll. In a world where anyone can contribute and make a difference, the possibilities for this category are broad and opinions are bound to be strong. True to form, the LKF community came up with a tie on this issue.
Winners: Andrew Morton and Keith Packard
Andrew Morton is the maintainer for the 2.6 kernel series, and has done an absolutely fantastic job of steering kernel development since 2.6 was released in December of 2003. Andrew has arguably made the most significant impact to the maturity of Linux over the last calendar year.
Keith Packard is one of the most notable developers of the X Window system, and earlier this year led the move to fork away from XFree86 and now develops for X.org and freedesktop.org, both of whom have contributed to significant advances on the Linux desktop in 2004. Recent additions such as Composite rendering and Damage extensions, while still at an early stage, are showing serious promise for improvement in the quality of the Linux desktop.
Best community
We picked the community best reputed for its contributions, user friendliness, resource richness, balanced advocacy and quality of code released.
The user community is one of the greatest attractions for many users. When you have the ability to interact with thousands of other users, many of whom tend to be vocal, problems are often aired and fixed quickly. A good community can make or break a project, as we'll no doubt see.
Winner: The Ubuntu Linux forums
Ubuntu broke onto the scene in October of the year, and a forum for user issues was started soon afterwards. It was quickly adopted as the official Ubuntu forum, and provides fantastic resources, from a well-maintained FAQ section to an active support forum for the development branch, as well as mailing list integration. The developers are very active in the community, and the overall tone is friendly and helpful.
An honorable mention goes to the Gentoo forum community. One of the most active communities on the web, this forum has probably had the question you're thinking about asking already answered. Twice. In six different languages.
Distribution of the year
We picked the distribution that best showed a combination of stability, openness, security and user friendliness.
Most distributions put out at least one release a year to keep up with changes in technology and occasionally philosophy. The success of a new release can often be gauged quickly from the reaction of established users. The good ones draw out the veterans and often manage to scrape up some enthusiasm from the crusty barnacles of entrenched tradition. This year, the winner did this and more.
Winner: Ubuntu Linux
Ubuntu started with a bang in October with the first stable release of a distribution based on Debian, but with the aim to deliver a regular, stable and security-supported snapshot of the best of the open source world. The practical upshot of this was a modernized Debian with a strong emphasis on the GNOME desktop, but the ability to customize the distribution however you see fit. Updates happen often in the development branch, and the distribution has a community feel and a polish that seems rare in other distributions.
Desktop application of the year
Forum-goers chose the best desktop application, regardless of desktop environment, taking into account usability, functionality, documentation and stability.
When it comes to applications on your machine, there are some you never touch. I don't think I've used Floppy Formatter . . . ever. But there are those applications that are always open, possibly consigned to workspace 4, but always open because they're integral to your workflow or just not worth closing since you're going to open them again in about 5 seconds. And there's always just that one program that you feel rocks out with indie-level power.
Winner: Mozilla Firefox
This category was dominated by Firefox, which reached a 1.0 release on November 9th after several years of development and several name changes. Firefox has become the poster child and banner-bearer for the OSS community, and is probably the most visible project overall. By being easily customizable and extendable, Firefox has garnered support on multiple platforms and has also been the recipient of critical support from the industry as well as numerous press sources. With this kind of momentum, the future has to look very bright indeed for the members of the Firefox community.
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