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What 2008 May Hold In Store for FOSS

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the hoping-for-nothing-but-good-things dept.

eldavojohn writes to mention that LinuxPlanet has a brief discussion on what 2008 may hold for FOSS. The list includes thoughts on KDE 4, OOXML, DRM, and 3-D desktops. What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to in 2008?

3 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Had to be said by MztrBlack · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm thinking many would not consider DRM in FOSS to be a boon of any sort...

  2. What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to...? by iminplaya · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The end of the tyranny of copyright law. Only then will there be true progress. Otherwise, this and everything else will be buried under the dog pile of licensing, which has already begun.

    --
    What?
  3. Re:I KNOW I KNOW! by Wonko+the+Sane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is no reason that AI shouldn't be integrated into the OS, but "invisibly". Here's an example:

    Joe User gets a lot of email. He tends to be organized, so he likes to sort his mail into different folders. He could use procmail or his client's filtering capabilities, but why should he have to? OSS has good solutions to the text classifying problem

    If only the email client (or imap server) paid attention, he's already supplying all the input necessary for a text classifier to sort all his mail for him without any additional action on his part.

    When Joe (manually) moves an email from his inbox to a new folder, this is a training event.
    If Joe notices that an email is in an incorrect folder and moves it (manually) to the right one, this is a retraining event.

    This concept could be expanded to other applications: how about a window manager that remembers where you tend to arrange your applications and starts putting them in the right place to begin with? The ability do manually set placement rules like with KDE doesn't count. That's just a workaround for not using the information the user is already providing.