How do you see Linux and open source software in general developing in the next ten years?
Saturday, September 12th, 2009 at
15:21
SAD (miss you)
I just hope you are very wrong with that prediction.
Filed under: Open Source
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I see Open Source reaching and exceeding commercial quality software ever more. It will become the software of choice for all but the most specialist areas with more room for customisation that we can today dream of.
Something has to give. But I reckon it will get better and better. The corporation will do everything it can to spoil it. It has to get better. I never wanted to write code until I got into the free software thing. Then I installed Linux. I’ve had several distros now and I love it. Warts and all.
Vista didn’t help microsuck in my view.
Infact, reflecting, it will do well in India, Brazil, Pakistan etc Well, I hope they produce lots of coders. I think it should never be made too easy. No one will have to learn anything
Its already developed into a great alternative to Windows products. I have WinXP Pro on one hard drive and Ubuntu 8.4 on another. Running Linux is so easy now, and open source has available, just about every conceivable "free" software, similar to what you pay for Windows.
I love the alternative. However !!! I am afraid that Linux will cave into commercialism, in the next 2 or 3 years. Too much money to pass up.
Open-source software will undoubtedly become more and more popular, as evidenced by the increasing number of mainstream programs, like Firefox and Audacity, that use open-source technology. OS X uses a very large amount of open-sourced code just by itself. Even Microsoft has begun opening up it’s standards to third-party reimplementation (if only to keep the EU off it’s back).
It’s hard to predict how popular Linux will be in ten years, although it will definitely still be here, and probably more popular. I think the popularity of Linux will increase as a platform on smaller portable devices and embedded computers, if not on the desktop. Consumers have shown that they like customizability on their phones, more than most phones today, even the iPhone, can provide.
If Microsoft doesn’t get it’s act together soon, Bill Gates could be out of business. It wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft did their own version of Linux within 10 years. Hmmmm…
Linux and Open Source, like Open Office and Audacity for example, is improving dramatically, see for yourself:
Kinda makes Vista look "icky", eh?
And, Google may surprise everyone!!! Is Google Linux that far away, and isn’t Chrome nearly an OS?
Google for: "gOS Linux" for example of what Google Linux might look like.
I see some major corporation trying to take over the Linux market and making everyone purchase it at an inflated price much like Microsoft does now. I then see a group of underground programmers developing an entirely new system and distributing it for free, much like Linux is today.
It will probably be named something like OpenWindow or BackDoor.
Linux will continue to increase in popularity as more and more people are exposed to it.
Right now, the "hottest thing" going in the "laptop" market are netbooks, not notebooks. These under-powered, sub Miniature machines are VERY well suited to Linux as their operating system, more so than XP, and they just can’t handle vista with any reasonable performance at all. Many, many people will have their first exposure to Linux on one of these machines.
The Android phone market will explode in the next year, as Motorola, LG and other members of the Open Handset Alliance get their phones to market. This will be another area where millions of people will be exposed not only to open source software, but the open source philosophy via the thousands of apps that are poised to appear on the "Android Marketplace" Most of which will be open source themselves.
(I saw a funny cartoon just this morning about android vs. iphone http://www.talkandroid.com/android-forums/android-chat/272-android-vs-iphone-cartoon.html This may be a cartoon, but it really points out the difference between Open and Closed source. With open source, it’s not the "company" who dictates what is available on your product, but also what any individual developer wants to see on HIS product. If the Application doesn’t exist and there are even a few people who DO want that feature, it’s bound to get added. This is not true at all with closed-source applications. Unless there is enough pressure to make the company (Microsoft/Apple) think they are loosing sales because of the lack of a feature, don’t expect that feature to show up in their product.)
Closed source software stifles innovation, Open Source promotes innovation and experimentation.
Someone mentioned OSX is open source, NOT TRUE at all. OSX is closed source. It is based on open source (BSD) but with the BSD license, you can take anything you want from BSD, change it, and make it proprietary without returning ANY of your changes or innovations back to the BSD community. This is exactly what Apple has done with OSX. The GPL (Gnu Public License) that Linux and most of the applications that run under Linux are released under allow anyone to take, modify and use the source code just like the BSD license, *however* unlike the BSD license, if you redistribute the product (Sell, or give away) then you MUST release the full source code of your software that was based on the software you "took" from the community. In this way, the GPL fosters innovation, because you get to use the existing GPL source code, but you must also return back to the community, your ideas and enhancements, so that someone else may use that as a building-block in developing the next innovation. That is not saying you can not write a proprietary application to run on Linux. That is fully possible, legal, and has been done a lot, BUT you can not use existing GPL code in your application. There is a set of libraries on every Linux system that are there specifically to allow linking to those libraries for closed-source software. Those libraries are released with a slightly modified license to allow proprietary software to interact with the Linux system without requiring the company to release the source code of their proprietary programs. Commercial companies LOVE the BSD license, because like apple they can take and take and never give anything back, but the END USERS appreciate the GPL licenses, because they give to the end-users and community. Fortunately Linux with it’s GPL prevailed in the average developer’s mindset, so of the open source market Linux is WAY more popular and receiving the attention of developers over BSD and similar Open Source operating systems.
Open source has WAY too much momentum to ever disappear. I think it was an IBM Linux commercial on YouTube that stated "The Future is Open" I would have to agree.