The end of the year is approaching and it is time to take stock. Of course this is very subjective and I would like to read the opinions of my colleagues and yours. But, in my humble opinion these are the salient facts when it comes to Linux and open source.
I'm not going to fall for all the platitudes about 2020. Each of you knows how it went. SImplement I am going to give a definition in three words: Another missed opportunity.
In my modest opinion. Another missed opportunity
From one day to the next, people, institutions and companies were forced to work in virtual mode. And, most opted for a proprietary solution: Zoom. Both David Naranjo and I take care of this platform.
David He told us that hundreds of thousands of Zoom user accounts had been sold on the deep web and in hacker forums while I I became busy de the questions of the New York prosecutor's office to the company for not responding to complaints about its handling of user privacy among other problems.
There were many open source alternatives and we take care of some of them; Riot, Rocket Chat, Apache OpenMeetings, and Jitsi. TAll of them were much better in terms of privacy and cost, but they took more time to set up. Although Jitsi provides the possibility of having personal meetings on their servers for free.
I want to highlight many users and communities who set up their own servers and made it available to other people.
The same case occurred with educational platforms in which it was chosen proprietary products of dubious respect by users instead of reliable opensource solutions.
Somehow the same thing always happens to us. We had the products that society needed and we were unable to offer them.
The networks and the truth
This year there were two phenomena. On the one hand, a very contagious disease, COVID-19, which is fatal for specific groups of the population and has pushed the capacity of health facilities to the limit. And, on the other hand, a gigantic social experiment in which governments, the media and other power factors tried to regain the influence they had lost at the hands of the Internet and social networks.
While some governments and conspiracy theorists downplayed the pandemic, others along with the mass media presented an apocalyptic scenario. In between, health professionals, statisticians and interested persons used the public data and open source tools to separate the truth from the lies and shared it on the networks.
Governments against technology
There is a change of government in the United States, however, Democrats and Republicans alike agree that Big Tech is abusing their dominant position and will need to make adjustments. Vice President Elect Kamala Harris made him pass a bad moment in Congress to Mark Zuckerberg and is a strong advocate for user rights.
Although I do not like state intervention too much, the truth is that hehe business practices of big technology are terrifying. I wrote about the subject in two articles.
The questionable practices of technology companies is not just a Western evil. The Federal Communications Commission of States United determined to exclude ZTE and Huawei as providers of the country's communications network. He did so after having demonstrated the close ties of both executives with the People's Army and the Chinese Communist Party.
Distro of the year
Did I tell you this article is subjective?
For me the best distribution of the year is Ubuntu Studio 20.10. I'm not a fan of KDE Plasma, but the integration with the Ubuntu multimedia distribution had a great result. It can be used without any problems as a general purpose operating system. David wrote about the topic.
The gaffe of the year
In a confusing year I could not miss my contribution to the general confusion. I wrote an article on the history of computing behind the Iron Curtain. In my enthusiasm to publish it, I added the first royalty-free photo of the Soviet flag. I did not notice that instead of Stalin he had a caricature of Stallone.
Hehej, with the stallone, everything is forgiven!