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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?
I've been hearing about this "free beer" with FOSS for years... maybe in 2008 we'll finally get some?
I'm thinking many would not consider DRM in FOSS to be a boon of any sort...
>>And in 2009 I hope a giant pengiun robot attacks Microsoft headquarters.
Quick someone call the japanese. They can build it. It would be awesome even if it didn't have any weapons. Just walking around the MSFt campus would be great for laughs.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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?
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.
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.