Before heading out for some Christmas cheer let’s leave a few moments to consider the future. What will 2008 bring? Many of the answers are unknown, but here’s something I’m fairly certain of.

"As you may know, Perl is now 20 years old. In lieu of buying her a beer and waiting around for a year, I'm looking for interesting stories and memories to collect and post on a Perl-related website with a very nice and short domain name in the next couple of days...."

The first thing we can say about the Linux desktop in 2007 is that there are more users than ever. The Linux Foundation 2006 survey had fewer than 10,000 people signing in. This year more than 20,000 Linux desktop users reported in.

Simon Willison has picked up a nice quotation from Linus he made a few years back, but what really interests me are some other things he said in the same post

"The open-source search engine backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales could go live as an early test version as soon as next week. Unlike Google, Search Wikia will not share search data with advertisers, nor invade privacy by storing users' search terms..."

The E-Commerce Times posted an interview with Jim Zemlin yesterday. Not surprisingly, he was very optimistic about the future of Linux, but his argument about cloud computing was particularly interesting.

10th and 11th Grade high school students at the American International School in Saigon, Vietnam, are using PCLinuxOS in the classroom. They are even learning how to use the command line.

"In 2008 we will see the Linux ecosystem applying a federation into one platform," said Jim Zemlin, director of The Linux Foundation. "A lot of Linux distros will compete in the marketplace. The particular flavor of Linux will matter in that different distros will cater to specific environments such as the Mobile Internet. All of these will center on the Linux Standard Base."