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More Linux Predictions for 2004 325

Posted by michael from the story-so-nice-we-ran-it-twice dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Experts, shmexperts - it's time for the Linux community's own predictions, felt the editors of LinuxWorld Magazine. Prognostications in their Jan 2004 round-up cover media players ('turning your phone into an iPod will be hot by the end of 2004'), IPOs ('Of course, LinuxCertified, Inc'), and MS ('Microsoft will start an intensive campaign to promote their Longhorn technology as Linux standards compliant') - that last is one from Samba's John Terpstra." The original story was back in November.
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More Linux Predictions for 2004 More

More Linux Predictions for 2004

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  • I predict.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @11:41AM (#7860699) Homepage

    Sun and IBM will be considered the biggest Linux players by the end of 2004, and that Linux will be installed on Mac like numbers of corporate desktops (corporate not techy).

    I also predict the return of thin-clients to the corporate environment, especially in large outsourcing contracts.

    • Re:I predict.. (Score:2, Informative)

      by RexHavoc ( 141253 )
      Also add in that once IBM settles the SCO stuff, they will buy Novell to get SuSE Linux. Then we will see PC's with IBM SuSE Linux roll out soon after.

      They already have 15,000 users internally (a drop in the bucket, but a start...) runing on SuSE desktops for daily work, but at the research division mind you.

      • Re:I predict.. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @12:08PM (#7860926) Homepage
        Disagree...

        IBM don't want to own a release they want to build on top of both SuSE and Red Hat, Sun will do the same. This will enable both SuSE and Red Hat to get good profits BUT... will ensure competition between them managed by the big two, thus preventing anyone becoming Microsoft. IBM will release, and support, Desktop versions released on Red Hat and SuSE to corporate customers depending on where they are based.

        Sun runs around 20,000 people off thin clients, and most of their laptop users are moving over to Java Desktop (really Linux).

        Think of it this way...

        Microsoft make money out of the desktop and want to make money out of the server using .NET, .NET only works on Windows.

        Sun and IBM make money out of the server, and want to continue to make money on the server. They make money out of J2EE based applications on those servers which runs on anything.

        If you kill Windows on the desktop you kill .NET, and killing it in this context means getting a significant enough share to make businesses question solutions that are purely windows based (say 10%+ should do it, 25% is the sweet number though). So how do IBM and Sun do this ? They release full desktop suites at a fraction of the price of windows (Sun will give you $150 a seat for their whole enterprise stack including desktop, office, email, application server, directory etc etc).

        Now the one thing that stands in the way here is Outlook, love it or hate it it does do calendaring and email, with task lists and that Exchange server is the thing that really stops people moving over. The Sun system kicks Exchange into touch.. but an open source solution that gets decent penetration would further help here. If Sun Messaging or Domino gain share in the next 12 months this will be indicative of companies looking to move away from Windows.

        The Sun and IBM plan is in many ways about killing .NET, not Windows.

        • ...that:

          • Sun will begin work on the e20k, which will support both Fujitsu Sparc and Opteron CPUs in the same box. Sun will announce that the e30k will also support Power(PC) and perhaps Itanium in addition to the above mentioned processor architectures. IBM may prove reluctant to provide Power, and Sun may turn to Motorola. Sun high end systems will render the proprietary competetion obsolete.
          • Sun will revive the PowerPC and Itanium ports of Solaris for the above systems.
          • Sun will wrap a GNU userland arou

        • Re:I predict.. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Lumpy ( 12016 )
          Sun runs around 20,000 people off thin clients,

          Amen, and this is also one of the killer things about linux that sucks under windows.

          Yes, I can get Windows to run on thin clients via a server and app servers just like linux. Problem is that it costs 20 Bajillion dollars to do it for even a small company of only 20-30 workstations.

          I know it's a change from the trend of the pc... Computer on every desktop to one master computer serving all the Terminals. but it works insanely well. A dirt cheap Dual Atha

        • Outlook (Score:2)

          by Bilbo ( 7015 )
          > Now the one thing that stands in the way here is Outlook, love it or hate it it does do calendaring and email, with task lists and that Exchange server is the thing that really stops people moving over.

          (*SIGH*) I use Evolution, and while I love it for email, and for personal calendaring, there still isn't a good *group* calendering server that I know of. Yes, I know there is the "Ximian Connector", but that still depends on Exchange, and is supposedly pretty crippled. (I don't have any personal

  • One of the things that would be nice... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @11:45AM (#7860736) Homepage Journal
    I'd like it if the Linux community could be a bit more persuasive with companies releasing Linux-related things to make them, well, more Linux friendly.

    Linux, for me, peaked in usability/reliability in 1999. It's still quite useful, but I began experiencing many more compatibility problems since that point.

    I have a video card whose driver is closed. I've got multiple peripherals that are only partially implemented because manufacturers for some reason are reluctant to release information to developers. It's great as-is, don't get me wrong, but participating on the Internet has gotten much harder as everybody decides to go proprietary and tug in different directions.

    For example, Flash runs slower on Linux; so slow that it causes the sound to go out of sync (related bug that also seems to bite some Windows installs: this [65.61.160.117] applet and those coded like it have audio that is too quiet). Java is still a real pain to get working right. Maybe the greatest thing that's happened this year is Mozilla/Firebird, but I'm running it without add-ons!

    I believe only great things are to come, what with Linux having reached 2.6.0, and greatly appreciate all the developers have done for it. Now, I think it'd be nice if others began to support it.

  • Reality check for linux in 2004 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @11:47AM (#7860753)
    2003 was clearly the year Linux became seriously accepted by analysts, investors, and most other non-technical people who needed convincing.

    2004 will be a year for delivery-on-promise and return-on-investment. The halo is off and linux will have to prove itself by the same measures other IT components are judged. Fortunately, linux will continue to leverage huge cost benefits, huge mindshare benefits, and a rising tide of anti-Microsoftism. that said, lofty valuation for RedHat and Novell will likely come into question sometime soon.

    • Re:Proving Linux (Score:3, Insightful)

      by symbolic ( 11752 )
      The halo is off and linux will have to prove itself by the same measures other IT components are judged.

      Since Microsoft has set the bar rediculously low in terms of measurable and effective productivity, this won't be much of an issue.
    • This sounds exactly like what was said at the end of 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002...

  • The year of the Penguin (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Stonent1 ( 594886 ) <stonent@stone[ ] ... t ['nt.' in gap]> on Friday January 02, 2004 @11:47AM (#7860759) Journal
    Seen Google's new logo?

  • Still not THE year, but coming along (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ewanrg ( 446949 ) <[ewan.grantham] [at] [gmail.com]> on Friday January 02, 2004 @11:49AM (#7860769) Homepage
    I think the general uncertainty in the market will prevent 2004 from being any more the Year of Linux than 2003 was. Not to say there wasn't any growth in the last year or that there won't be more this next year.

    I certainly think that Microsoft sending out numerous free copies of Small Business Server 2003 shows that they are taking Linux much more seriously than previously. And I think when we hit 2005 and companies have to make a big decision either way that if the Linux offerings by then for the small shop and desktop have improved their UIs so that virtually anyone can setup Linux on their current machines as easily as or more easily than a Longhorn upgrade, THEN you will see the mass migration.

    FWIW...

  • Torvalds will be... (Score:5, Funny)

    by EduardoFonseca ( 703176 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @11:57AM (#7860834) Homepage
    ... hired by Microsoft. RMS and ESR will join the SCO legal team. Bill Gates will get even fatter. Steve Ballmer will resign from MS and join some wicked monkey-dance group.

    slashdot.org will be bought by Fox News. CowboyNeal will become a Fox News Anchor.

    The world will collapse.

  • Stuff to look out for in 2004. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2004 @11:58AM (#7860851)
    There is a lot of stuff coming out for Linux in 2004, here is a list of the most antisipated stuff. Distros
    • Mandrake 10
    • SuSE 10
    • Slackware 10
    • Fedora Core 2
    • Lindows 5
    • Gentoo 2004
    • Knoppix 4
    • Debian 3.1. Ooops, thats delayed until 2010 :)
    Desktops
    • Xfree86 4.4
    • Xouvert
    • KDE 3.2
    • Gnome 2.6
    • XFCE 4.1
    • More Boxes
    Applications
    • Mozilla 1.6
    • Mozilla bird collection
    • OpenOffice 1.2 or 2.0
    • Nvu
    • Evoloution 2
    • Gimp 2
    • KDevelop 3
    • Mplayer 1.0
    Look forward to these, I know I am waiting for Mandrake 10, I am currently trying out the new snapshot :).
    • Xouvert will likely not be the X project to take off over time - I suspect freedesktop.org will become the de facto kingmaker and they seem to be going with XServe,

      Also you are not mentioning Cairo at all, and I believe this will be a huge X enhancement in 2004/5 whenever it comes along.

      As for apps, I continue to advocate Gnumeric and AbiWord, which I believe are superior to their less-polished looking OpenOffice equivalents.


    • Desktops

      1) Sun Java Desktop

      2) IBM Linux Desktop

      What it is under the cover doesn't matter, its the name at the front that counts.

    • You know, just listing a bunch of applications and incrementing their current version by 1 isn't that much of a trick.

    • KDE 3.2
      Xfree86 4.4
      Xouvert

      A bit pessimistic, I think. KDE 3.3 is scheduled for december 2004 if released on time, and talks are going for making it only 3.2 and half, to give more time for KDE 4.0. That would mean summer 2004. Xfree86 4.4 is already in RC2, with the core-team out the way 4.5 should be out by the end of 2004 too. Also Xserver at freedesktop.org is way more interessting than Xourvert, and should make a lot of splash in 2004.

  • Office monopoly will begin to crack (Score:5, Interesting)

    by astrashe ( 7452 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @12:03PM (#7860899) Journal
    I think we're on the brink of the collapse of Microsoft's office suite monopoly. There's a lot less lock-in with office than there is with windows, so it's much easier for people to switch to open office.

    Microsoft's pricing and online activation system has already pretty much removed office from consumer pc's. People who used to take cds home from work are doing without, and it's only a matter of time until the word about open office gets out. I'm not claiming that open office is as good as microsoft office, but it's good enough, I think.

    I think that microsoft is making one of the biggest mistakes in its history in the way it prices office. The strategy seems to be aimed, as near as I can tell, at keeping corporate revenues high while allowing MS to cut prices for low end consumer machines.

    A corporate workstation with xp pro and office pro pays microsoft almost 3x what a consumer user with xp home and works pays. I don't think that reflects costs or utility to the customer.

    The most useful part of what people pay microsoft for comes from xp home -- it gives you the ability to run the huge library of windows software, access to the huge array of hardware device drivers, and core networking tools. What you get, for the buck, from jumping to xp pro or adding office on to the back, provides a lot less utility for each dollar spent.

    If you decide that the corporate market can bear substantially higher prices than the consumer market, and if you notice that the main differences between a corporate user and a home user is office, then loading up the costs on the office side makes sense. I think that's what they're doing, and I think it's a fundamentally unstable pricing scheme.

    So I predict that we're going to see corporate workstation users going with xp home and open office. A lot of computers that have been sold with $375 worth of microsoft software on them will now be sold with $94 worth of microsoft software on them.

    MS-Office still makes sense for a lot of people. If you run exchange server, and want to use outlook as a groupware client, it makes sense. Excel users who earn a lot are going to get the spreadsheet they know and want, no one's going to tell a $150k/year guy to learn a new spreadsheet. But those types of users don't add up to a monopoly.

    If the office monopoly begins to crack, it will be a really big deal. It will be a decline in a core microsoft business, and will suggest that perhaps the best days are behind them. And it will be the result of an open source project.

    Windows to linux is a very wrenching change, in a million little ways. But MS-Office to Open Office is a lot more doable.

    I think that's where MS's empire will first start to crack.
    • They will not use XP Home because it doesn't allow the machine to be added to a domain. Small business, maybe, but not corporate.
    • no one's going to tell a $150k/year guy to learn a new spreadsheet.

      If an employee of mine makes $150k/year, I might expect him to learn a new spreadsheet on his own time. The more money they make, the higher my expectations, especially if they are in a liquid position (ie. easily replaceable).

      Which would cost more? Replacing the $150k/year person, or the continued software licenses? It's a cost-benefit analysis, not so easily waived.

      • If you pay anyone $150k/year that you consider "easily replaceable", I'm not sure I'm willing to rely too heavily on your business sense.

        While we're at it, if he's learning a new spreadsheet because you're paying him, he's not doing it on his own time; He's doing it because you're paying him, and he's not doing something else for you he could be otherwise. So, which costs more: the continued software licenses, or paying your employee to learn a new spreadsheet. That's your cost-benefit analysis. Take wh
    • MS Select customers actually get good deals.

      Windows XP Pro License: $127
      Office XP Pro License: $297
      Key numbers that never require activation: priceless

      Open office.org (WTF do they insist on adding .org? that sounds horrible) is a good product for the general user. It does 80% of the things that Office does. The problem in my environment is that other 20%.. we have to do things in Office that Open Office JUST CAN'T DO. We need application integration. Some of our custom apps are written to integrate w
      • I wonder how many people have scripted ms-office, or use it as part of a larger custom application. But you're right, that's the sort of situation, like the ones I mentioned (people using outlook for groupware, etc.) that will keep people in the ms-office camp.

        I'm not saying that there won't be a huge market for ms-office. I run it myself, and I have scripted it myself. I like it. I just don't think it will remain as a monopoly. Almost everyone has to use it if it's going to remain as a monopoly.
      • Changes like that don't happen overnight. I see OpenOffice making inroads predominantly in:

        • Schools. It's much more reasonable for a teacher to tell students to download OO than to pirate/buy MSO to do their homework
        • Price-sensitive small corporations
        • Home users with not too big office usage

        It's an uphill battle at the moment, but as soon as OO gets critical mass it will become the standard and MSO will be dwindling fast.

      • We need application integration. Some of our custom apps are written to integrate with Word and that integration doesn't function. Asking for OOo intergration? Not gonna happen.

        Try this [openoffice.org]. We have many of our apps inhouse that use Word and Excel via automation that I'm strongly considering moving over to OO, especially our one vertical app that we sell that requires Word 2000/XP/2003 in order to function.

    • One big problem. It can't open all of their old Office documents yet. I have openoffice on my machine but keep having to use my laptop to open Office documents sent to me in formats it can't open correctly. The whole world isn't going to open all of their documents & reformat so the burden still lies with OpenOffice.

    • OpenOffice.org (Score:3, Informative)

      by pommiekiwifruit ( 570416 )
      Perhaps it will be useful when it is capable of performing trivial tasks as assigned in IT intro courses (which my auntie is taking to improve her salary) such as:
      1. Open a .doc file. The formatting should look correct.
      2. Save a .doc file. Information should not be lost.
      3. Copy and paste from an Internet Explorer window that contains selected check boxes and radio buttons. The data should look the same.

      Unfortunately somehow the program got installed on her system and "stole" the .doc file extension association

    • Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack (Score:4, Interesting)

      by robertjw ( 728654 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @01:18PM (#7861455) Homepage
      I think Open Office is good enough to compete with MS-Office, but most importantly it reads and writes MS-Office (word, excel) files very nicely.

      Converting to Open Office will not only crack the Office suite monopoly, but it will give the Linux desktop a foothold in the corporate world. Many office users primarily require MS-Office to do their jobs. If corporate IT can move these users to Linux and using Open Office they will.
    • Microsoft isn't blind to this. The $149 Student and Teacher Office Edition is licensed for up to three computers in a single household. Their challenge is to prevent the price cutting in the home arena from affecting the Corporate prices.
  • Here's a thread [arstechnica.com] at Ars' OpenForum giving their predictions. whiprush's initial post is very insightful.

  • Perhaps... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Oen_Seneg ( 673357 ) * on Friday January 02, 2004 @12:13PM (#7860961)
    ...Steve Ballmer gets drunk and decides to open source all of Microsoft's products.
    • I'm fairly certain that guy has perpetually drunk and high on some highly illicit drug for years, and it isn't open sourced yet...

  • I predict... (Score:3, Redundant)

    by Dirtside ( 91468 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @12:22PM (#7861027) Journal
    I predict that predictions made for 2004 will be no more accurate than the predictions that were made for any other year, and we should all stop wasting our time.

    People wouldn't make so many predictions if they were forced to wear a signboard at the end of the year with a list of all the predictions they made that didn't come true. Say, that sounds like an idea....

  • Where's Mandrake? (Score:3, Informative)

    by tickleboy2 ( 548566 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @12:35PM (#7861122) Homepage

    Which distributions will show the greatest growth in 2004?

    I was surprised that Mandrake didn't make the list. Mandrake in my experience is one of the easiest distributions to install and use and has made some impressive contributions over the last year (9.2, MandrakeMove). Still I have to admit I haven't tried SUSE so maybe I'm missing out on something...

  • shared memory experts? (Score:3, Funny)

    by smoon ( 16873 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @12:38PM (#7861145) Homepage
    shmexperts must refer to experts of shared memory -- what exactly does that have to do with predictions of the future?

    I predict that a new algorithm for thread-safe access to shared memory will be developed using either semaphores and spin-locks. But them, I'm no expert.

  • "And The Future?" by PJ of Groklaw (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PSaltyDS ( 467134 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @12:43PM (#7861201) Journal
    Our brainy heroine and penguin loving paralegal babe, PJ at Groklaw [groklaw.net], posted an article [groklaw.net] covering some New Year's trend spotting. Some of the goodies:

    1. Invester's Business Daily makes up its Top 10 Tech Stories [investors.com] of the year without mentioning Microsoft in any context.

    2. A speculation comes from Chris Gulker in an IT Managers Journal article [itmanagersjournal.com] that Microsoft will introduce an MSLinux when Longhorn turns out to be unsellable. (Good thing or bad thing? I think good, if it happened.)

    3. The example of Smart Displays [pcmag.com], where per-user licensing inhibits even Microsoft's innovation, as cited in a Register article [theregister.co.uk]:

    "The final nail in its coffin was Microsoft's absurd decision to kow-tow to the tin god of its licensing agreements. If you took your smart display downstairs, nobody in the den with the computer could use it. Single user licence, repeated Microsoft marketing droids. 'We can't compromise our standard licensing policy."

    4. From the counter example of what can be, in the MagicBike [nytimes.com] project of the Parsons School of Design, PJ muses: "The idea is, when everyone gets to play, innovation is the result. Innovation doesn't come from money or walled-in projects, although money can help implement ideas. Innovation comes from people, and as George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, talent can show up simply anywhere, where you least expect it. The lower the barrier to entry, the more likely you are to get wonderful ideas. It's one reason I keep it possible to leave anonymous comments on Groklaw, despite the down side to that."

    5. Vince Cerf's vision [bbc.co.uk] of the ubiquitous net is cited, reaching even to other planets.

    PJ concludes: "Yes, [Microsoft] must adapt in order to be part of the future. I think it's a given that no one wants a wireless product that can only legally connect to one PC predetermined during setup. Not after somebody sent the mayor an email from a bike in Union Square station in NYC. Or even read about it. Once you have the concept and you see what is possible, you know what you know, and Brand X doesn't work for you after that. Like the song says, there's nothing like the real thing."

    I know most of these points have been previously featured on /., but I like the compilation of them as a converging threat to Microsoft's paradigms that may cause significant rethinking in 2004.

    Besides, I think I have a crush on PJ... :-)

  • Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bmajik ( 96670 ) <matt@mattevans.org> on Friday January 02, 2004 @12:47PM (#7861225) Homepage Journal
    What Linux standards ? How many differnet "Linux" distros are compliant with these standards ? what are they ?

    Furthermore, how would it benefit Microsoft to tout that "longhorn is compliant with xx". Microsoft already has source level compat with much free software via the Services For Unix Interix SDK. Windows can be an NFS client or server with SFU. CIFS interop between linux and windows could be better I suppose, but my feeling is that samba needs to move upwards, and microsoft has little incentive to move downward to acheive this.

    I guess i'd just be curious to know where this statement came from. It sounds mostly like a "wouldn't that be nice" without a lot of thought behind it.. like an emotional victory rather than something of technical significance..
    • A lot...compatibility with EXT2/EXT3, 100% samba compatibility, drivers for printing to CUPS servers, etc...

      In reality, this should be called open standards compatibility...but, some of this would be bad for M$...like EXT2/3 compatibility...makes dual booting easier...
    • Drive letters, ^M^J translation built into the OS, lack of environment variables like $HOME, non-GMT time stamps on the files, inability to handle many punctuation marks in filenames and ISO-8859-1 case-insensitivity and thus the inability to handle UTF-8 correctly in filenames, refusal to provide some GNU tools like a Unix shell...

      All of these little details cause us far more grief than the differences in the GUI. And Microsoft could address these easily, eliminating a huge fraction of the hostility that
      • dude, what are you talking about ?

        drive letters are primarily provided for backwards compat. They're slowly going away.

        $HOMEDRIVE and $HOMEPATH are both defined on this XP machine.

        you can make files (and other objects) case sensitive if you like; services for UNIX install will do this for you if you so desire.

        Services for UNIX does include many GNU utilities... i use tcsh on my XP laptop quite frequently. gcc is there if you want bash, zsh, or anything else you can think of..

        UTF-8 is a poor standard
    • If an out-of-the-box Windows installation could run Linux programs it would be the death for the Win32-API. Microsoft would be pretty dumb if they do that.

      Microsoft does everything to make their stuff as incompatible as possible, all of the sudden they won't start to change that.

  • The Munchen (Munich) migration project sets of.
    Sideeffect: That SuSE guy I met last year asks me and my team to join and take care of some data migration and we make heavy loads of Euros as subcontractors to SuSE/Novell. :-)

    All in all, Linux reaches critical mass in germany. More and more vendors and service providers start to recognize Linux as an OS. More and more PCs come without preinstalled Windows. Perhaps the first mass PCs come with Linux preinstalled.

    Negative side effects: We see IT idiots and mo
  • In 2004 those (hard working) people over at KDE will change the K, in their name to some other letter. The letter K just comes up with images of crap in my head. ex. K-Car, K-mart (do they still exist anymore, there used to be one in my town but it went out of business) and KDE.

    Just kidding, jeez, don't get all upset about it.
  • I figure I'll throw in my two cents:

    1.) Package format becomes a hot topic. Discussion regarding a standard takes center stage. Work begins on a standard package format, a stable version is expected in 2005. Adoption of linux on the desktop continues to be slow.

    2.) Resolution and refresh rate changing on the fly (ala Windows since 9x) will finally appear in desktop distros.

    3.) NTFS read/write support will be sorted out using the NTFS driver from windows. Microsoft will not issue a patch that breaks compa
  • Where are the ESR predictions? The new year isn't the same without ESR proclaiming that Microsoft will fall within six months.

  • Where Linux Will Beat MS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bilbo ( 7015 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @03:54PM (#7862883) Homepage
    As I was reading through this article, one statement really jumped out at me:
    I think instead of new applications, a significant development will be localization and personalization of Linux distributions for different uses. ...
    -Rahul Chopra
    I think this is significant because it's one area where Linux and FOSS software has a clear advantage over MS -- one which I don't think they can ever overcome. Microsoft has internationalized their products for a great number of other languages and locales, but as was seen recently in Israel, if the internationalization is difficult (L-to-R scripts), and the market is relatively small, it just doesn't make economic sense for them to do it.

    Open Source, on the other hand, works according to another economic model, one which is not limited by profit-loss ratios and ROI. If you have people interested in it, you can create an internationalized version of a package for any audience. Now, there are still complicated technological issues (such as some of the really complex scripting systems in many of the smaller markets like SE Asia), but once we get past some of the difficult hurdles of creating truly flexible font and glyph servers and text rendering systems, we will see Linux and FOSS expanding into places where MS cannot hope to go. True, these won't bring in gobs of cash for Linux developers and ISV's, but I think we will see steady progress made. We will soon see Linux as the foundation for technological, and ultimately economic freedom for the majority of the world's governments and citizens.

  • I predict (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ShadowRage ( 678728 )
    that linux will get some steam, but will face new legal concerns, IBM and sun will be sued by microsoft for imitating their gui, then gnome and kde will be sued in the whole ordeal, apple turns around and sues microsoft ripping off NexT

    might not be that far.

    but I predict this year will be the year of tech lawsuits as a new major player gets involved in the market.

    I wouldnt be surprised if the GPL got overturned and claimed invalid by a well paid judge.

    the shit with SCO last year might prove to be the st

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