December 9th, 2005
The rest of 2005, which leads to 2006
Early this week I started a Top 10 list for 2005 in open source, and asked you what you thought about it.
The result was a nice long thread and some very interesting e-mails, which caused me to think of something important. While a new year is an important milestone, it’s an artificial one. Trends continue.
Which leads to the rest of my life.
- Sun’s commitment to open source, with Solaris, Java and SPARC, is going to result in something important in 2006. Don’t know what it is, but I’ve got to believe that it will happen anyway.
- Localization. Projects like Ubuntu Linux can put computing into anyone’s native language, even if that language is rather unpopular. This will bring change in unexpected ways, in unexpected places.
- The Wikipedia story has just begun. Despite some media attempts to diss and dismiss it, it may be the most important project of our time.
- Version 3 of the GPL will be dealt with next year, but the FUD surrounding that process ran hot in 2005, and that won’t change. But the results of that process will be profound.
These explanations are more long-winded than the six stories I mentioned earlier, but hopefully they give us more to talk about.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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