(Tech) Linux Rules The World. Where to next?

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Linux has many applications that are clones of Windows applications (for example, XMMS is a Winamp clone), so if you could run the same setup on Windows and Linux, install the applications and use them, you wouldn't need to build native versions for each operating system. Of course, in an ideal world, you would have the source code for every application, you would compile it for your platform and run your optimized version.

Another problem for Linux is hardware support. I found a Linux distribution (PCLinuxOS) that has different builds for different graphics cards, but I couldn't find another Linux distribution that works on my Acer notebook: all crash in the setup phase. Ok, maybe I didn't try every distribution, but I tried to install Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva, Slackware and many other small ones. I'll keep burning boot CDs and DVDs until I find a decent distribution that works with my notebook.

I think open source it's great, but most users don't want open-source software. They use Firefox because it's fast, secure and better than Internet Explorer, not because they can find the source code and change it. So we shouldn't say: I don't like Picasa because it's not open-source. It's Google's decision and that shouldn't influence our opinion about the software itself, which has a very nice interface and it's very easy to use.

Since the 3.18 release on December 7, 2014, just under 115,000 changesets have been merged from 5,062 individual developers representing nearly 500 corporations. The top developers work for, in this order, Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, Samsung, and SUSE. Thousands of developers still work on Linux independently of large corporations.

That said, well over 80 percent of all kernel development is done by developers who are being paid for their work. The ranks of unpaid developers have been slowly shrinking for years. It was 14.6 percent in the 2012 version of this paper, 13.6 percent in 2013, and 11.8 percent in 2014; over the period covered by this report, it has fallen to 7.7 percent. The number has been declining because kernel developers are in short supply and high demand. Anybody who demonstrates an ability to get code into the mainline Linux kernel won't have any trouble finding a job.

In the last year and a half, there have been many significant Linux improvements. These include:

1. Live patching support.
2. Persistent-memory device support.
3. Encrypted storage for the ext4 filesystem.
4. Adoption of the extended Berkeley packet filter (BPF) engine for in-kernel extensibility security-module.
5. Numerous networking enhancements with a focus on IPv6 and datacenter improvements.

Linux developers have also turned their attention to improving Linux's security. Support has been added for numerous hardware-based security features. These include Intel's memory protection extensions and memory protection keys, and ARM's privileged execute-never mechanism.The kernel itself has been hardened to prevent attackers from taking over the system even when a security hole is present. This largely consists of integrating work the longstanding grsecurity project.

So, as developers work on the next 25 years of Linux, Ramirez encourages them to realize that their work can have far more of an effect on the world than they realize. Therefore, they should make technology that aspires to create a better world. She concluded, "I know what I'm asking might not be easy, but changing the world never is."

Linux already has changed the world -- the one thing we know for certain is that it will continue to do so. Therefore, it behooves programmers to try to improve not just their code, but the world.