2019 predictions for OSS

Well, this is the time of year when people make big predictions for the coming year. But let me start by saying the headline is something of a misnomer. I’m not clever enough to have any predictions for 2019 for a couple of reasons:

  1. There are far too many clever people working across the myriad fields of expertise that make up an OSS for me to possibly guess which might gain traction this year
  2. I’m yet to figure out whether there are any consistent patterns or cycles like Moore’s Law that uniquely define progress in OSS. On the contrary, you could claim that there are any number of metrics that might define progress for OSS (or to any individual OSS stack). But I’ll also be honest enough to say that I haven’t tried applying any of these futurology techniques to find any useful patterns either.
    Futurism Methodologies

Instead, I’ll call out the many industry-wide challenges / opportunities that are still waiting to be solved in 2019. Many of these same challenges / opportunities have been around since I first started working on OSS projects in circa 2000.

The Passionate About OSS Call for Innovation paper outlines a list of starting points where exponential improvements await.

I’m not sure if any will be solved in 2019 but I will make the prediction that the thousands of very clever people working in the OSS industry will make some exciting steps forward this year. Hopefully they’re some of the quantum leaps that await and not only the ever-present, but still highly challenging, incremental improvements.

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