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No crime, no lag, no malware: 2020′s internet sounds like heaven. PC Plus checks out its foundations.

Safe, secure and speedy: that’s the internet of 2020. In a decade’s time, the web will be a very different place. There will be no crime, no malware and no fake online banking sites. Latency won’t be a problem. High-definition video will be smooth, and buffering will be a distant, nightmarish memory.

And that’s not all. The internet will have grown dramatically, making room for a new generation of connected devices: cars, phones, TVs, everything. Super-fast speeds are the rule, not the exception. To borrow a phrase, it just works.

At least, that’s what we hope the web will be like. To make it happen, engineers merely need to rethink the way the internet works and change pretty much everything. What could be simpler? Some big changes are already in progress. The explosion of internet-
enabled devices means that we’re running out of IP addresses even more quickly than expected: RIPE NCC’s Managing Director Axel Pawlik noted in January that the pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses would run out as early as 2011. But the move to IPv6, which can handle around “a trillion trillion trillion” addresses – 3.4×1038 if you’re feeling pedantic – is largely a software, not hardware, issue. “In most cases it’s very easy to reprogram connectivity software on a chip to ensure a device is IPv6 compatible,” Pawlik says.

But things aren’t progressing as straightforwardly as you would think. “Despite the simplicity of ensuring compatibility, widespread IPv6 take-up has so far been slow, and many of the best known digital devices available today, including the iPhone, do not yet support the next generation of IP addressing,” warns Pawlik. That lack of urgency is disappearing fast, with big names like Google implementing IPv6 support, router firms embracing the new system and new operating systems – including Windows and OS X – supporting it.

If we’re late embracing IPv6, the internet won’t grind to a halt – existing IP addresses will keep working – but as the European Commission reports, “the growth and also the capacity for innovation in IP-based networks would be hindered”. The EU is pushing IPv6 hard, and it expects European ISPs and “the top 100 European sites” to be IPv6-enabled this year.

As a happy by-product of IPv6, widespread adoption will make the internet more secure too. The IPsec security protocol is a compulsory part of IPv6, which means all IPv6 communications can be encrypted and authenticated.

Route masters

We’re using the internet in ways its creators couldn’t possibly have imagined, from the rise of video to the sheer number of connected devices. We’re constantly pushing the internet’s capacity, stability and security, and inevitably cracks are beginning to show.

Aaron Falk is the Chair of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) and Engineering Lead with the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). “There are many areas where the current architecture is straining to meet the needs of the users,” he says. “In particular, the areas of mobility, security, and network management were not well addressed in the original architecture, leading to a patchwork of mechanisms. The greatest concern is not so much that today’s traffic is challenged but that the ad-hoc machinery being inserted into the network will inhibit future innovations. I worry about tomorrow’s applications more than today’s.”

The IRTF is a technological trouble-shooter for internet architecture, as Falk explains: “The IRTF hosts research groups that work in areas ‘adjacent’ to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). This can be pre-standards technologies, hard problems that emerge from the IETF or operations communities, technologies where the internet may be one of many possible communications strategies, or architectural issues.”

He continues: “Sometimes research groups assist IETF working groups by bringing researcher expertise or otherwise ‘pre-baking’ technologies so they are ready for standardisation. For example, the Mobility Optimizations Research Group has been working on IP mobility solutions that feed into the MIPSHOP (Mobility for IP: Performance, Signalling and Handoff Optimization) working group for standardisation. Another example is the IRTF Research Group on Internet Congestion Control (ICCRG) which evaluates new congestion control proposals that arise in the IETF.”

I dream of GENI

One of the problems with the current web is that it’s too big and too important to muck around with. That’s where GENI comes in. The Global Environment for Network Innovations is funded by the US National Science Foundation, and it’s best described as a (serious) playground where new ideas can be tested out. “GENI will support two major types of experiments,” the organisation says. “Controlled and repeatable experiments, which will greatly help improve our scientific understanding of complex, large-
scale networks, and ‘in the wild’ trials of experimental services that ride atop or connect to today’s internet and that engage large numbers of human participants.

“We’re well underway on the second year of GENI prototyping, GENI Spiral 2,” Falk says. “One of our more exciting activities is what we are calling ‘meso-scale deployments’ of virtualisable, programmable routers, switches, and WiMax base stations on 14 campuses and two national research backbone networks. Deployments like these are particularly exciting because they’ll allow experimental applications and services built on GENI to directly reach real users on university campuses. Thus researchers will have the ability to build new services – perhaps incompatible with the current internet – and test them at-scale with real end-users.” One area of concern is routing tables, which the net’s backbone routers use to direct online traffic. The BGP (border gateway protocol) routing table has grown hugely, doubling in size between 2003 and 2009, and there are concerns that if the level of growth continues, router hardware won’t be able to cope. The IRTF’s Routing Research Group (RRG) is investigating alternatives, and its goal is to produce solid recommendations that the IETF can implement. Another related program is Rochester Institute of Technology’s Floating Cloud initiative, which hopes to address the problem of routing table growth by moving the routing tables from inside routers to network clouds. Initial testing took place on a dozen Linux boxes, and the next step is to try it on GENI.

The BGP routing table doubled in size between 2003 and 2009, and it’s still getting bigger.

GENI isn’t the only initiative that the NSF is helping to fund. Its Future Internet Architectures (FIA) program is offering $30million to fund projects that will transform the net. As the NSF puts it: “Proposals should not focus on making the existing internet better through incremental changes, but rather should focus on designing comprehensive architectures that can meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.”

FIA is a continuation of FIND, the NSF’s Future Internet Design project. FIND asked researchers to redesign the internet from scratch, and FIA will narrow around 50 FIND projects down to two, three or four serious contenders.

Safety and security

With the existing internet, security is something that’s largely been bolted on as an afterthought – but the FIA program expects security to be a key consideration from the outset. That’s leading to some interesting ideas, including one security system that takes its cues from Facebook. Davis Social Links (DSL) adds a “social control layer” to the network that identifies you not by your IP address but by your social connections. If it works – and DSL is in the very, very early stages of development – it could make a major dent in problems such as spam and denial of service attacks.

Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab, would like to take things even further. In October, he argued that the internet’s biggest weakness was anonymity, and that everyone should have online passports. “I’d like to change the design of the internet by introducing regulation – internet passports, internet police and international agreement – about following [web] standards,” he told ZDNet Asia.

Kaspersky explained further on the Viruslist.com blog: “When I say ‘no anonymity’, I mean only ‘no anonymity for security control’,” he writes, explaining that he couldn’t care less what people posted on blogs or downloaded through BitTorrent. “The only [requirement] – you must present your ID to your internet provider when you connect.” Kaspersky argues that such requirements are inevitable, with some EU countries already introducing digital IDs. “Another prototype of e-passports is the two-factor authentication we use to access corporate networks,” he says. “The only thing missing today is a common standard.”

Security guru Bruce Schneier isn’t convinced. “Mandating universal identity and attribution is the wrong goal,” he writes on Techtarget. “Accept that there will always be anonymous speech on the internet. Accept that you’ll never truly know where a packet came from. Work on the problems you can solve: software that’s secure in the face of whatever packet it receives, identification systems that are secure enough in the face of the risks. We can do far better at these things than we’re doing, and they’ll do more to improve security than trying to fix insoluble problems.”

The quest for improved security is attracting a lot of attention – and a lot of money. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded contracts worth $56million in January to two firms as part of its National Cyber Range security programme, which will enable network infrastructure experiments, new cyber testing capabilities and realistic testing of network technology. A month previously, Raytheon BBN Technologies was awarded an $81million contract by the Army Research Laboratory to build the largest communications lab in the US, again to research network security.

David Emm is part of Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team. “It would be unrealistic to expect a wholesale re-architecture of the internet, or even of some of the technologies that are used online,” he says. “If we fix the problem by removing the facility, we run the risk of damaging legitimate activity too.”

There’s also the issue of displacement: if the internet becomes tougher to compromise, villains will simply switch to social engineering instead. As Emm points out, corporate email filtering to remove attached ‘.exe’ files simply spawned the use of links rather than attachments to spread viruses and other malware. “There has always been a human dimension to PC attacks,” he says. “Patching code is fairly straightforward once you know what you need to fix. But patching humans takes longer and requires ongoing investment.”

The last mile

There’s another big piece of architecture that needs upgrading: the bit between your ISP and you. Whether that’s a wired connection or a wireless one, today’s technology needs a serious speed boost. As Tim Johnson of broadband analyst Point Topic explains, “ Over the past 15 years or so we’ve seen the data speeds that typical home users get going up roughly 10 times every five years. I think that will continue over the next decade so that by 2020 many users will be getting a gigabit on their home broadband.

BT’s 21CN project is a software-driven network that aims to drive innovation.

“The big barriers that must be overcome to get there are (a) extending fibre all the way to the home, and (b) providing the backhaul capacity and the interconnect standards to make it useful,” he elaborates. “Both of those are do-able but I think it will be quite late in the teens before they are achieved.”

Johnson reckons that things will get particularly interesting when 100Mbps+ connections are the norm, as they will be able to deliver immersive, high-definition environments and “a huge new space of technology, applications and lifestyle possibilities”. But he’s not convinced the internet can even handle that – not in its current form, anyway.

“This kind of application is rather different from what the internet was designed for and is good at,” he says. “From an engineering point of view it will mean provisioning capacity that will allow users to set up assured end-to-end symmetrical calls of at least 20Mbps each way. There also needs to be a huge amount of standards development and investment to support setup and switching. […] It’s possible that this could all be done across the open internet, but my own belief is that as this type of traffic grows it will create the need for more dedicated capacity. IP and intelligent multiplexing will still rule, but the basic architecture will be different.”

Going mobile

In developed countries, the internet is moving away from the desktop and onto mobile phones and other wireless devices, while in developing countries the internet is primarily a mobile medium already. In both developed and developing countries the number of mobile internet users will increase dramatically in the next decade. So if you think the mobile networks are creaky now, things could get considerably worse in a decade.

For the mobile internet at least, the future may look an awful lot like the past. As Jon Crowcroft of the University of Cambridge writes: “We are so used to networks that are ‘always there’ – so-called infrastructural networks such as the phone system, the internet, the cellular networks (GSM, CDMA, 3G) – and so on that we forget that once upon a time (why, only in the 1970s) computer communications were fraught with problems of reliability, and challenged by very high cost or availability of connectivity and capacity.”

Noting that technologies such as email coped fine in those conditions, Crowcroft suggests that, “It appears that it’s worth revisiting these ideas for a variety of reasons: it looks like we cannot afford to build a Solar System-wide internet just yet, [but] it looks like one can build effective end-to-end mobile applications out of wireless communication opportunities that arise out of infrequent and short contacts between devices carried by people in close proximity, and then wait until these people move on geographically to the next hop. It’s interesting to speculate that these systems may actually have much higher potential capacity than infrastructural wireless access networks, although they present other challenges (notably higher delay).”

Such systems – variously called Intermittent, Opportunistic or Delay Tolerant networks – have a wide range of applications. They’re useful in emergencies and in areas where there isn’t an existing network infrastructure, and they’re particularly well suited to emerging applications where a constant signal can’t be guaranteed, such as internet-enabled cars.

While such networks could ultimately be deployed in remote areas, for most of us the future of the mobile internet is very similar to what we’ve already got. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is a kind of 3G network with knobs on, and in the UK at least it’s generating much more interest than the rival WiMax technology. When LTE begins to roll out later this year it will deliver theoretical speeds of up to 140Mbps, rising to 340Mbps after a 2011 upgrade. An even faster version of the network, LTE Advanced, is in the works. It’s worth noting, though, that even the first version of the LTE network will take several years to roll out nationwide.

And WiMax? In February this year, Patrick Plas – Alcatel-Lucent’s Chief Operating Officer for Wireless – told reporters that the company “is not putting a lot of effort into this technology any longer” as mobile networks were showing “a clear direction taken by the industry towards LTE”. That’s an honest indication of where the mobile internet is heading.

Looking ahead

Predicting the future is a tricky business, and predicting the future of the internet is doubly so. However, it’s clear that the next decade will see some dramatic changes in the way the web works. Some changes are definite – the move to IPv6 will happen, albeit more slowly than many would like – while other developments such as opportunistic networks may never become mainstream.

What we can predict is that the internet of 2020 will be coping with user numbers and traffic volumes that we can barely imagine. To be able to cope with that, the net will probably become a hybrid: a mix of old and new. As Falk puts it: “Recent interest in ‘clean slate’ network architectures encourages researchers to consider how the internet might be designed differently if, say, we knew then what we know now about how it will be used,” he says. “But that is not to say we must discard the current internet to fix the problems. The internet has tremendous value, has supported astronomical growth and changed the lives of millions of people. I believe research in new internet designs will provide insights on where the high-leverage points are on the current design thus allowing us to understand, justify, and deploy changes that will bring the greatest benefit.”

It’s not all iPods and MacBook Pros, Apple has been known to design, build and sell some serious flops.

When Steve Jobs speaks, the world listens. His fabled Reality Distortion Field makes even the shiniest piece of chrome and plastic glisten just that little bit more. The phrase ‘One more thing’ moves every member of the audience to the very edge of their seats, knowing that whatever follows, they’ll soon have one in their possession. But it wasn’t always like this, and even the all-powerful Apple of today sometimes stumbles in mid-stride. We’ve gone in search of the 10 biggest flops, missteps and bad ideas that found a half-chewed worm emerging from the apple of our eye.

1. Pippin

Super Nintendo. Master System. Jaguar. Megadrive. Pippin. Can you spot the odd one out? It sounded like a child’s toy, but not many children ever had the chance to play on Apple’s ill-fated games console, Pippin. Technologically speaking it was a Mac in a smaller box, intended to play hot CD-based gaming classics like Terror Trax, The Journeyman Project and Mr Potato Head Saves Veggie Valley.

But whereas most games manufacturers quickly learned the importance of controlling their ecosystem with a vice-like grip, Apple planned to sell the core technology to several different companies – which is ironic in light of the company’s current modus operandi. Unfortunately, like everyone who tried to take on gaming giants Sega and Nintendo, Pippin was a miserable failure. It was an underpowered, undersupported system that reportedly only sold around 5,000 units in the US. Being a computer, Pippin did have some interesting technology on its side, including innovations like internet access, but without the games to back it up, it was all for nothing.

Also, it was called Pippin.

After Pippin crashed and burned, Apple largely gave up on gaming – and most developers still avoid the Mac. However, times have changed. The iPhone’s gaming library hasn’t defeated the mighty Nintendo, but it’s the first thing for a long, long time to pose a really genuine threat to it, if only among casual players.

2. Apple USB Mouse

The infamous ‘Hockey Puck’ is one of Apple’s most mocked inventions, appearing with the launch of the iMac in 1998 and promptly hanging around homes and offices like a bad smell for years to come. Not only was it ugly, it made pointing and clicking about as much fun as typing on a keyboard covered with needles, using a speech recognition system that insisted you neck a balloon full of helium before every instruction, or anything involving Microsoft Office’s ‘helpful’ paperclip.

Not only was its round shape clumsy and uncomfortable, it was far too imprecise when gripped and prone to turning instead of moving. The cord was far too short if you plugged it into the machine rather than the USB ports on a Mac keyboard, and the buttons weren’t very comfortable. Some good did come out of it, though – third-party manufacturers made a fortune selling alternatives and adaptors.

3. iPhone Apps

When the iPhone was first revealed in all its wonderful glory, one thing was notably missing: applications. Apple got to write them, serving up sleek email and calendaring, maps and music playing. Everyone else was limited to creating websites that could be blessed with an icon on the home screen, without access to any of the interesting hardware that made the iPhone so innovative. Steve Jobs described this as “a very sweet solution”; everyone else went with ‘bad joke’. As was pointed out many times, if web pages were up to the job, why were all of Apple’s own apps Cocoa-based, with not a single HTML offering among them?

In retrospect, this was the first sign of trouble brewing. The App Store is now huge, and many have made a fortune from it, but Apple’s control over the platform is only becoming more problematic. From junk programs to bizarre rejections, scaling issues and the high cost of entry, every day sees new complaints from developers.

Ironically, the increased prominence of HTML5 coupled with Apple’s lockdowns has persuaded many that, just maybe, taking the web route might be better after all. One of the most notable examples is Google. After going through all kinds of trouble getting the Google Voice app approved, the company realised that it could allow anyone with a smartphone to log on by making the service available via the browser. Anyone in the US, anyway – Google Voice is still to be released here.

4. Apple Lisa

Apple kit is too expensive. That’s the most common criticism of the company, and it has been right from the start. The Lisa, launched in 1983, was an attempt to go after business customers by offering a more powerful system, higher resolution graphics and support for multitasking and protected memory. It found a market, particularly in document creation, but the cheap availability of both IBM PCs and standard Macintosh systems worked against it.

The Lisa did however offer expansion ports, and a snappy name – although one with no easy explanation. The official version is that it stands for Local Integrated Software Architecture, but nobody believes that. The standard backronym is Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym, but most believe it was simply named after Lisa Jobs, Steve’s daughter. Jobs worked on the project for a while before jumping ship to work on the Macintosh project.

The Lisa was just too expensive to take off when it was launched in the early ’80s.

5. Newton

Pity the poor Newton. Probably Apple’s least-deserved flop, this PDA platform (the actual devices were called MessagePad) was truly ahead of its time. It featured integrated handwriting recognition (which worked reasonably, if not completely reliably), was controlled by a touchscreen, and offered lots of applications to make early adopters’ lives easier, including notes, contacts and dates. That’s nothing too special by today’s standards, but it was an exceptionally powerful device in the early ’90s. However, this was only intended to be the start of Newton’s capabilities. Apple saw the devices as computers in their own right, and we’ve yet to truly see a successor that has actually pulled off that massive leap. Perhaps the iPad will be it…

6. Motorola ROKR

While the hardware was Motorola, the appeal of the ROKR was all down to Apple. This was the first phone built around syncing to iTunes, and one of the few third-party products to get the full Steve Jobs stage treatment. And… it wasn’t good. At all. Not only was it a tacky product, it was stuffed with infuriating limitations, like only being able to hold 100 songs no matter how much extra storage it was given, offering no way of buying music online and connecting to your Mac or PC via a slow USB 1.1 cable instead of the faster 2.0 standard. Jobs’s demo of the phone conveyed absolutely none of his usual enthusiasm, and for good reason. This was 2005. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone, and the failed first attempt at a Jobs-approved phone was consigned to history.

7. Apple TV

The Jobs seal of approval isn’t always a guarantee of quality, then – and Apple TV is another example of a product that failed to make the grade. Apple TV combined the worst of several worlds – reliance on the Apple ecosystem, lack of an optical drive and the state of internet-available entertainment in the UK back in 2007 – to produce a largely useless electronic paperweight. In fairness, the Apple TV wasn’t a terrible unit, but it hit too early and was too much a company player instead of focusing on what customers would actually be best served by.

Nowadays there are so many other options available that the window of opportunity for it has well and truly closed. Apple still makes the devices, but even it has largely moved on to focusing on new products. Apple TV may have introduced people to the idea of media streaming in their house, but it’s products like the WD-TV Live and PlayOn that are finally making the humble computer a fundamental part of the TV-watching experience.

8. QuickTake Camera

Much like the Newton, the QuickTake’s failure had less to do with the product itself than the situation it found itself in. It was one of the first consumer-level digital cameras, so it was fairly rough and ready – no screen, no easy photo deletion – and it shot at a resolution of 640 x 480, with a pitiful 1MB of memory. Three different versions were released from 1994 onwards, but like most of Apple’s non-computing-focused products, Jobs axed the line after returning to power.

9. The Twentieth Anniversary Mac

$7,499. We shall repeat that: $7,499. No matter how much of an Apple obsessive you might be, no matter how much you think the user interface and style warrants high price tags, dropping $7,499 on a new machine to celebrate a company’s milestone is on the wrong side of the Lala River in the valley of Areyoukidding. This was 1997, when a regular Mac of the same specification would cost you just $3,000. Apple managed to sell a handful at this insane price, but it was quickly forced to back down.

Fancy spending $8k on a prettified Mac? Didn’t think so.

By 1998, when the unit was discontinued, the price was down to under $2,000. It may have looked snazzy next to the resolutely ugly beige boxes of the time, but the Twentieth Anniversary was proof that you can in fact put a price on style, and it’s one that most people aren’t ultimately that willing to pay. It has become something of a collector’s item, however; perhaps that counts as success of a kind.

10. MobileMe

Apple had no excuse for MobileMe to flop. The idea was as obvious as it was brilliant – syncing mail, calendars, files and photos between your computer, your iPhone (you did buy one, right?) and the web. So what went wrong? Well, everything. Not only was it overpriced – and at £50 for a year, remains so – but the original version barely worked. File sharing was missing in action, online storage was too slow and the calendar was a joke compared to Google’s offering. As for email, it was fine if you actually wanted to use an Apple-branded address, but with more and more of us switching to personal domains, especially for professional purposes, MobileMe’s lack of proper domain mapping really bit down hard.

Even the launch of the service was a big disaster – the pages were slow, the servers were constantly down, the push messaging promised didn’t work, and worst of all, a number of trial users found their credit cards charged too early. Apple tried to patch up problems by extending the service’s free trials, but there’s no doubt that what most who tried it in those early days remember is a horrible experience from a company that makes its money providing the best. Not cool, Apple. Not cool at all.

There are three reasons why Linux isn’t succeeding on the desktop, and none of them are to do with missing functionality, using the command line or the politics of free software. The first is that there’s too much momentum behind Microsoft Windows and too many preconceptions about the alternatives. Linux is perceived as having too much of a learning curve for relatively few advantages and an unknown heritage. Migrating big business to a Linux desktop is akin to turning a T1-class supertanker around mid-Atlantic. The opposite direction may look brighter, but it’s easier to chug onwards into the storm.

You only have to look at the number of people clinging to Microsoft’s venerable Office suite to see this point clearly. For the vast majority, most of its functional fecundity is wasted. Many people could arguably be just as (un)productive with Notepad, Calculator and Paint, let alone using an open-source alternative such as OpenOffice.org. Its use seems to have more to do with keeping face when attaching files to an email than a genuine operational advantage. Most people will only consider an alternative when there are bigger issues, larger icebergs or uncertain territories on the horizon.

Away from the desktop, Linux is faring better. Smaller, more agile businesses quickly quantify the cost advantages to produce cheaper and more competitive products. This is why embedded Linux has been such a success on everything from Chinese mobile phones to almost every NAS box around. This may mean that success on the desktop is only a matter of time, or it may mean that the Linux desktop is too far removed from the Linux kernel.

The second reason for failure is that Linux lacks centralised marketing. This is because there’s no real Linux Central. It’s just a trademark owned by its creator, Linus, and a term normally reserved for just the kernel of the operating system – hardly the easiest product to sell. There are plenty of people advertising their own Linux endeavours, all keen to push their own angle on its advantages. This divided effort compounds the problem. With the likes of Red Hat, Novel and Canonical all fighting for their own slice of the pie, there’s no one left to push Linux as a distinctive brand. That’s something Apple and Microsoft do extremely well, and something Linux leaves to Tux the penguin.

Many would argue that standards are the answer to this conundrum, and that would mean a single base distribution. This could then be the only distribution called ‘Linux’ – everything else would become ‘Linux-based’. Mozilla manages this well with the use of the Firefox brand. It’s freely distributable and modifiable, but it can only be called ‘Firefox’ in its untouched incarnation. Change anything and you need to change the name. For example, Debian calls its Firefox build ‘IceMonkey’ because it needs to reserve the right to make modifications, thus breaking Mozilla’s standards. This may cause confusion if you look for Firefox on your Debian desktop, but it also sets a precedent for the kind of experience that Mozilla expects its users to have, and Debian hackers still have the code to mess around with if they need to. It’s a compromise, but it might work in a world with hundreds of Linux distros.

The third reason is easy to see but harder to solve. It’s the reason why you’re not using Linux now. The solution would make all other problems redundant. The reason why you’re not using Linux now is because there isn’t a good enough reason to. Sober advantages such as better security, improved performance, rock- solid stability and low cost aren’t going to win converts. These advantages aren’t exciting enough; they’re the equivalent of a spreadsheet of mortgage repayments.

What we really want is a significant upgrade, something you’d normally pay for. Perhaps we should focus on value. Recent analysis of the kernel by Jon Corbet showed that 75 per cent of the 2.8 million lines of code in recent contributions were written by paid-for developers. That puts Linux freedom in context.

But the biggest challenge is sexiness. There’s very little of it in Linux unless you’re an antisocial geek, and products like the Apple’s iPad illustrate this massive divide painfully. As Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, puts it, “Linux can compete with the iPad on price, but where’s the magic?”

Linux has the programmers, the managers, the community, the innovation, the time and the skill. But to succeed in 2010 and the coming decade, what it really needs is a magician or two.