Last year was among the best of times for Linux and open-source. It was also the worst of years. The top five Linux and open-source stories tell it all.
SPECTRE/MELTDOWN
First, last January there were a lot of exhausted and angry Linux kernel developers. That’s because a fundamental chip design mistake led to Linux and all Intel-based operating systems having to deal with the Spectre and Meltdown major security problems.
Linus Torvalds, Linux’s master developer, added, that with the “security issues kept under wraps, we couldn’t do our usual open methods. This made fixing the bugs much more painful than it should be.”
IBM BUYS RED HAT
I didn’t see this coming. IBM made the biggest software company acquisition of all time when it paid $34 billion for Red Hat. This deal wasn’t about Linux. It was about IBM wanting Red Hat’s cloud, container, and Kubernetes expertise.
Read more at ZDNet
