Top 5 open source stories of 2024

2024 has been an interesting year in the news for many reasons. The open source world has been generating a lot of news this year. Here are our five favorites.

1. All Things Open launched “We ❤️ Open Source,” which they define as “A community education resource.” A recent article at FOSS Force states, “‘All Things Open’ Revives the OpenSource.com Community Abandoned by Red Hat,” states, “The All Things Open organization is picking up the baton abandoned by Red Hat when it quit publishing OpenSource.com.” This new resource provides another excellent outlet for those of us who used to write for Opensource.com.

2. CentOS is another victim of the IBM-led withdrawal of Red Hat from supporting the larger Linux community. AlmaLinux is stepping in to fill that void. The Alma Linux website says that it’s, “An Open Source, community owned and governed, forever-free enterprise Linux distribution, focused on long-term stability, providing a robust production-grade platform. AlmaLinux OS is binary compatible with RHEL®.” Alma Linux is not supported by Red Hat or any other organization so they depend upon contributions from users. A monetary contribution would be a good way to support important open source software.

3. Open source code is the foundation of the Internet, supercomputing, financial markets, most modern mobile devices, and much more. Many startups and mature companies have used open source as the basis for products. However the foundation of open source itself is being rocked by the proliferation of new licenses by those companies that profited from its use. One example is the HashiCorp’s re-licensing of its Terraform software. Companies that take this step justify it with explanations that involve “bottom line” excuses even though theirs seem to be fine.

4. AI is everywhere in 2024 and a lot of interesting things are happening. The startup Databricks developed and released DBRX, which they contend in a Wired article, is “the most powerful open source large language model yet—eclipsing Meta’s Llama 2.” Databricks will release the model under an open source license so that anyone can build on it.

5. Fedora has long used the GNOME desktop for it’s flagship edition. It looked like that was going to change due to a proposal to make KDE Plasma the default desktop for it’s flagship product. A compromise has led to elevation of Fedora/KDE as a second flagship edition, along with GNOME. All the other spins that we’ve been using over the last few years will still be available, but GNOME and KDE will get top billing. This is a good move because KDE has improved significantly in recent years and I find myself using it more than any other desktop environment.