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More Win, Fail and Meh of Open Source in 2008

Win - OpenSolaris 2008.11 - Sun's OpenSolaris has been a bit of an ugly sister at the open source operating system ball, but with OpenSolaris 2008.11, it has managed to become a solid competitor by embracing more open source. Gone is the now hideous CDE desktop, replaced by a clean, and now well integrated, Gnome environment. The sharper edges of Solaris have been filed down too. More importantly, Sun has pushed on with their development of Dtrace and ZFS, two enterprise server level technologies which bring ultraflexible tracing to live operating systems and a [ticker:uk_112212 powerful scalable filing system]. For your average desktop user these may not mean much right now, but once these features are tamed with good applications they could change the way you think about performance and storage. And new ways of thinking are a win.

Fail - Debian OpenSSL - When Debian's OpenSSL was found to be generating weak keys, it sent many users off to check their keys. The fall out from the flaw acted as a counter example to the suggestion that many eyes may make all bugs shallow. Many eyes can still miss a problem too.

Meh - The Disappearing Linux Netbook - When the first EEE PC launched, it ran Linux, giving Linux a 100 per cent share in the netbook market. By the end of 2008 though, reports of Linux's market share in the netbook market put it at anywhere between 30 per cent and 10 per cent. What happened? Microsoft turned up with a cheap XP licence which was trimmed and fitted for the specifications of the new netbooks. This has lead to the netbook market coming into line with the general laptop market. Part of the blame lies with the Linux distributions on netbooks, which are still maturing. By next year, we should see packages of the next Ubuntu Linux release, tuned for particular netbooks, but it is probably much too late for Linux to go back to a dominant share of the market.

Win - GPL victories - The GPL had a good year, thanks to the Software Freedom Law Center and their well thought out process of engage, negotiate and litigate. A number of successes on behalf of BusyBox has lead the FSF and SFLC to now go after Cisco, a company they consider a major offender. The year also saw the appearance of guides from the SFLC on how companies should deal with GPL software and violations of the GPL, making the legal situation much clearer. GPL V3 and the AGPL also had a good steady year of winning acceptance, and a lot of small wins make a big win.

Fail - Red Hat Security - Red Hat managed to find their infrastructure compromised in the late summer, with persons unknown being able to install keyloggers on the machines used for signing packages. Apart from the obvious lesson that no matter how much security you have, you can always have more, the incident reminded the Linux community that the most valuable resource in distributing Linux is trust. Red Hat remedied the problem and released re-signed packages, but had to rebuild parts of their IT infrastructure in the process, a situation which no-one would enjoy.

Meh - Android - In what should have been a great new arrival in the mobile phone market, the Linux powered, open source Android operating system stalled a little as the first phone it appeared on didn't get rave reviews and a few flaws were found. This was partly down to the phone being an old design, and partly down to features, such as virtual keyboards, being missing from Android. The features are coming, there are new phones with Android being announced and with people porting Android to different mobile devices too, 2009 could well be a great year for Android. For 2008, it scores a Meh.

Go to the next page for the shorter Win, Fail and Meh of Open Source 2008

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