Jonathan Corbet, co-founder of the LWN website and Linux kernel maintainer, shared his predictions for 2024 , including changes in the Linux kernel community, the impact of the market on enterprise Linux distributions , the future of Firefox , and open source generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) is getting more attention , the promise of BPF , the success of Python no-GIL , the crisis facing maintainers of open source projects , and more.
Here’s a quick look at what Jonathan Corbet predicted.
1. The Linux kernel community began to no longer use mailing lists as the core of its development process . This transition will be slow and cause strong resistance from many kernel developers. But in this era where even boss Linus says he wants to make changes , incredible things are likely to happen.
2. Linux 6.12 will be the next long-term stable version of the kernel , expected to be released on December 1, 2024 (unless Linus refuses to release it immediately after the US Thanksgiving holiday, in which case it will be released a week later).
3. The first batch of user-visible Rust codes may be merged into the kernel as early as Linux 6.8 . This code shouldn't support many systems initially, but it marks an important shift: once Rust is used for user-visible functionality, the kernel community can no longer easily drop support for the language. In other words, incorporating user-visible Rust code into the kernel will declare the Rust experiment a success.
4. Red Hat’s enterprise Linux distribution market will be impacted in 2024 . The control of this market was basically dominated by Red Hat RHEL before, but as competition in this field becomes increasingly fierce, building a stable version of Linux no longer needs to rely on RHEL. There are many ways for vendors and users to take away part of the market from RHEL.
5. Google's strong push for "Manifest V3" in Chrome will cause widespread resistance , but if Mozilla only bets on artificial intelligence this year and does not focus on Firefox - helping the world get rid of the browser monopoly, Firefox may never be like this again. opportunities to expand market share.
6. Open source generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) will receive wider attention in 2024 . Part of the reason is that there are already cases in this space where open source projects are more competitive than private ones. And there will be more copyright disputes on these private platforms this year - causing more people to turn their attention to open source projects.
7. This year will be an important year for BPF . This is not surprising as it has been the case for the past few years as well. Items like the extensible scheduler class don't seem to be going away. Meanwhile, Cisco's recently announced acquisition of Isovalent may bring new resources to BPF development, or it may, as many corporate acquisitions do, destroy an important BPF development team.
8. The first Python version that supports free threads (no-GIL) will be released in October and will achieve certain success.
9. Excessive pursuit of indicators will become a bigger problem . These metrics include: number of CVEs, bug reports filed, number of commits, patches "reviewed", toots promoted, discussion forum badges earned, etc.
10. The crisis faced by open source project maintainers will intensify in 2024 . There are many projects in the free and open source software community that are widely relied upon but receive little support. As a result, these projects often face slow progress, heavy technical debt, security issues, and more. This phenomenon is not new, nor is it hidden from anyone who has been paying attention. But from all indications, companies that rely heavily on open source projects will not be providing them with more support in 2024.