Leading items and editorials: And so the year comes to the
close, Some major development milestones we’d like to celebrate and
What will the next year bring?
“And so the year comes to the close. And what a year! 2000
stands out for highs and lows for Linux and Free Software. This is
the time of year when we take a step back and try to get an overall
perspective, as well as some guesses as to what lies ahead. For
those of you interested in previous such efforts, feel free to
check out the end-of-year coverage from 1999 and 1998 as
well….”
“Some major development milestones we’d like to celebrate:
XFree86 4.0, KDE 2.0, Perl 5.6.0, PHP 4.0, PostgreSQL 7.0, Gnucash
1.4, Python 1.6 and 2.0, and Netscape 6 (the first based on
Mozilla). Some exciting products not yet to a stable release
included Helix Code’s Evolution and Eazel’s Nautilus, both exciting
projects for the future of the desktop. Don’t shoot us for leaving
out the other 99% — this edition would never have made it out the
door….”
“Now for the hard part. What will the next year bring? Well,
we’ll refrain from any attempt to predict the overall economic
health of the US or any other country in the world. Nonetheless, we
will predict that Free Software and the value of the concepts
behind it will weather both good news and bad. In the midst of a
massive loss of value for Linux stocks on the NASDAQ exchange, IBM
announced plans to pour a billion US dollars into Linux next year
and more billions of dollars over the years to come. Dell has
announced major commitments to the Linux platform. All of the major
software companies out there are focused on Linux and Free
Software, no longer as a get-rich trick, but as an essential part
of their business plan….”