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What 2008 May Hold In Store for FOSS
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?
That's what I'd like, a version of bash implemented in opengl, so I can make the console apps I write look funky.
Not perhaps the highest priority of the FOSS world, but sometimes you just gotta go with 'it`d be fun'.
I'm among those who would be happy if existing apps could get fixed, Firefox being the prime example. On my G4 Mac every new realease of FF brings more crashes, more memory leaks, and generally more sluggish performance. I finally abandoned it last month for Opera, which I am liking very much.
When most Open Source apps were small, simple and fast I could tolerate the inevitable bugs, and assume that they would be fixed up in the next release. Now it feels like everyone is working to add more and more features and "widgets," but no-one is worrying about overall stability and reliability.
Three Squirrels
SDL + OpenGL + OpenAL + OpenTNL (or HawkNL) + ODE + DevIL + FreeType. There you go, Windowing + Input + Threading, Graphics, Sound, Networking, Physics, Texture loading and Fonts all with a similar syntax (i.e. glEnable, alInit etc.) all also aim to be cross-platform and importantly, all bind together really well and will compile on pretty much any modern Linux distro, Windows or Mac OS. Of course Microsoft provides math functions (but honestly.. you only need to write a math lib once and there are plenty free ones out there anyway). Write a game using those libraries and you hardly need to do anything to make it completely cross-platform (just file paths *cough*boost-filesystem*cough* and a few other bits and pieces).
There are 2 reasons Microsoft has a hold on the games market:
1. They provided a decent, well-supported solution first (well by the time they got to DX7 or 8 anyway)
2. Big games developers can't just change the way they work without a very VERY good reason.
The only way we can expect a shift in Linux support in games is if Linux market share gets to about 20% and ATI/nVidia really start supporting open source drivers properly so Linux drivers can as fast (if not faster) than the Windows ones. It will happen... it'll just take time.