April 2002 is going to be a hot month for Linux. Once per a year or two
there is a time crowded with announcements, and I try to guess them and
their exact time. I'll repeat it here. Contrary to research companies
(such as Gartner, IDC) I will not use general forecasts ("new versions
of Linux desktop managers will be announced during 2002") or disclaim
myself ("probability of 0.6"), but be very specific. Nevertheless, I
had always high successes (~80%), and I hope to repeat them this time.Contrary to proprietary software, OSS is composed of many projects that are developed in parallel, and each has its own major releases, usually once per 2 or even 3 years. If you take the 10-15 key OSS projects, and their major announcements are spreaded over the time, then you have 1 or 2 announcments per a quarter. Sometimes, in coincidence, many projects reach important milestones together. It is going to happen now, on April (and maybe May too) which is going to be exciting, with almost a major announcement per a week. Some of the following announcments are known to some people here, some not. For the convenience of everybody, I'll list all of them here: KDE 3.0: ======== Beginning of April, +- 1 week. GNOME 2.0: ========== Expected to May 1, according to the schedule. A big loss for GNOME, which is going to miss the inclusion of its new version in RH8.0 (Red Hat has been always the most loyal supporter of GNOME). My guess: somewhere in May. Apache 2.0: =========== After 4 years of development, ASF will release it on the beginning of May, +- 2 weeks (my guess; ASF doesn't know it, yet...). The main cause of delay, in my eyes, is 3rd-party add-ons slowing to port their stuff to 2.0 (webmin, FastCGI, Apacompile, etc.); the stability is very high, and 2.0 is mature and ready for the big time. Mozilla 1.0: ============ End of April, +- 2 weeks. SuSE 8.0: ========= Expected by the vendor to April 22 (they will meet it, of course; after all, they are German...). Will be based of KDE3 and XFree86 4.2. SuSE was blamed in the past for delaying their FTP availability, to encourage purchasers of the CD's, so don't expect any FTP availability on April 22. Red Hat 8.0: ============ End of April, +- 2 weeks. Will contain KDE3 and XFree86 4.2, but still GCC-2.9.6 and GNOME 1.4. (first time that KDE is supplied in a better status than GNOME under RH; of course, users can always download GNOME2 when it is ready, but the experience teaches us that more than 90% of the users don't upgrade anything, maybe except for security patches). WINE 1.0: ========= Contrary to the expectations, I do NOT see any WINE 1.0 soon. Although this is a list of expected announcements, and not of the "non" announcments, I mention it here, because there are too many rumors about a soon 1.0. Wow, what a list... and all of this, in a so short time... There are many other expected announcements, but not as imporant as the listed above (although it depends on your personal taste, which may differ than mine...). Some of the other announcements are not major upgrades (but only minor), and some are of not so important packages. Happy (and Kosher - for those of us who are not offended by this wish) Passover! -- Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] CTO, Founder Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. __________________________________________________________ Tel.: +972-9-766-1020 8 Yad-Harutzim St. Fax.: +972-9-766-1314 P.O.B. 7004 Mobile: +972-50-23-7338 Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
