As a journalist, if a very different kind from Trudeau, I appreciate the sentiment. Looking back at 2007, who could have predicted that, after all the posturing by open source advocates, that the new version of the GNU General Public License would have caused so little division? Or that Linspire and Xandros would have followed Novell and made their own deals with Microsoft? Or that virtualization, which was such a hot topic in 2006, would have settled down to just another technology?

KDE 4 launches

2008 will kick off with the long-awaited release of KDE 4 on January 11. Traditionally, a major version number indicates major changes, and KDE 4 will be no exception. Performance, look and layout are all being radically rethought. You can expect some controversy and complaints, but also considerable enthusiasm for the final release.

The End Software Patents Coalition swings into action

A few days after KDE 4 is out the door, the End Software Patent Coalition (ESP) should come out of stealth mode. Bringing together both the Free Software Foundation and a number of undisclosed private companies, ESP is well-funded, and will be trawling for a test case for its goal of abolishing software patents in the United States. You won't find many people defending software patents in the free software community, so ESP won't create much controversy, but you can expect a lot of blogging and news articles about the coalition and the issues it’s tackling.

The OOXML controversy continues

OOXML is Microsoft's alleged open standard for office applications, released largely to counter the growing support for Open Document Format, a true open standard. OOXML has thus far failed to become an ECMA or ISO standard, but the groundwork for further discussion and the conditions of the final vote for the EMCA is scheduled for February.

No matter how the vote turns out, it will be followed by an equally impassioned debate about whether free software should support OOXML. GNOME is already trying to support it -- and receiving flack -- while KDE says that it has no intention of doing so. In the long run, cross-compatibility with Microsoft Office is important enough for applications like OpenOffice.org that OOXML support seems hard to avoid, but the discussion is already ugly, and will only worsen before the issue is resolved.

DRM flares up again

So-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) quieted as an issue in 2007, and, last summer, there were indications that hardware manufacturers and retailers was turning away from the idea of lock-down technologies. However, the release of Amazon's Kindle reader, the efforts at reform in Canada, and the steady rise in the user-base for Windows Vista (which will undoubtedly becomes the most ubiquitous example of DRM in most people's lives) all indicate that the subject is ripe for re-emergence.

In fact, just as I was typing the above paragraph, I received an email from the Defective By Design campaign, which has led so much of the DRM-opposition in the past two years. The campaign is obviously preparing for a busy year.

The first complete free video drivers appear

Free video drivers capable of 3-D acceleration have been at the top of the Free Software Foundation's high priority list for several years. 2008 may very well be the year in which this goal is achieved. The Nouveau project is working hard to provide free 3-D drivers for NVidia cards, while the Avivo project and AMD/ATI are doing the same for ATI cards. The breakthrough will likely occur somewhere past the halfway point in the year.

3-D desktop distros become the default in some distributions

To some extent, this trend depends on the arrival of free video drivers, but, if they don't materialize, users of 3-D desktops like Beryl/Compiz will simply use proprietary drivers instead. 3-D desktops don't help you get your work done any more efficiently, but the Wow factor is simply too great for many users to resist them. Many already include 3-D desktops as an option, but being the first to use one as the default will gain some lucky distribution a moment of one-upmanship.

However, the main drawback to 3-D desktops continues to be that older machines can't handle them. For this reason, while they are likely to become more common in the coming year, they aren't going to threaten the traditional desktops just yet.

Next page: Preloads, Java, GPL and OLPC

Red Hat Joins Sun's Open Source Java Party
SGI: Still Alive And Kicking

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