Here are the stories we published that you liked the best in 2024. Some of them surprised us when they started getting gazillions of reads. Others didn’t.
Since most websites, newspapers, and such like to run Top 10 lists at this time of year, we thought we’d jump in with a Top 10 list of our own, to look at the 10 stories from this year that interested our readers the most. Some of the items that made the list — starting with the article that ended up in the top slot — surprised us. Others, such as the article with the SCO connection as well as our coverage of the Redis clone, seemed about right.
We’ll fill you in with a few of our thoughts about each article as we look back on the year that just passed.
Valve Releases Steam Audio as Open Source: We would never have expected this article to make this list at all, much less for it to hit the top spot — mainly because we don’t generally cover gaming at all. We covered this because of the potential it had to effect developers throughout open source. Looking back on how many of you read it, perhaps we should change our policy and start covering gaming more. What say you?
How SUSE Is Replacing Red Hat as the Linux and Open Source Enterprise Standard-Bearer: This article went up in July and caught fire when folks at SUSE found it, liked it, and started sharing it all over social media. Incidentally, next week to bring in the new year, we’ll be publishing an article that’s written around an interview that Christine Hall did a while back with Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, SUSE’s CEO.
Once Linux’s Biggest Enemy: Darl McBride Dies and Nobody Notices: Actually, we were a wee bit surprised that this article didn’t hit the top spot, mainly because we remember a time that any article that mentioned SCO, Linux, and McBride was guaranteed about a gazillion reads. Too many years have passed, evidently. A lot of today’s Linux and open source users are too young to have first-hand experience of the SCO-IBM war that had Linux at its core and made an open source hero out of Pamela Jones and Groklaw.- Gentoo Linux Becomes a Software in the Public Interest Project Because…Bookkeeping and Taxes: Even though Gentoo is one of those distros that many people thinks belongs to a past when Linux was expected to be difficult to use, it didn’t surprise us when readers flocked to read this (if readers can be said to flock). Its position here just goes to prove that plenty of people are still interested in Gentoo.
- Revolt of the Redis Maintainers: New Redis Clone, Valkey, Has Linux Foundation Support: That this one got a lot of reads was even less of a surprise than the Gentoo article’s popularity. After all, for open sourcers what’s not to like? An open source company drops the open source license for a “source available” license and blames it on open source not being a good “business model.” Immediately a bunch of people fork the software as Valkey and before you know it the Linux Foundation is involved to supply funds. Some of Redis’s best customers jump onboard to help develop it, and start swapping it into their infrastructure to replace Redis.
- The Unintended Consequences Linux’s Wayland Adoption Will Have on BSD: We would never have expected this to be the second most read article in July and the sixth most read article for the year. Basically, Hall wrote this mainly to bring attention to a blog that Chris Siebenmann had published on his University of Toronto blog.
Sheng Liang’s Acorn Labs Drops Its Runtime for GPTScript: We’ve been following Sheng Liang since he first started Rancher, which was well before SUSE bought it. This year, when he turned his runtime startup Acorn on a dime, to turn it into a generative AI startup, we asked why. Evidently, y’all were wondering why too.
Oregon Passes ‘Right to Repair’ Law With Extra Cojones: FOSS and “right to repair” pretty much go hand-in-hand, so when Oregon passed a law that actually had teeth, we sat up and noticed… and so did you!
How Red Hat’s Bad Actions Led to Wind River’s eLxr Pro Linux Distro: You know that Red Hat has strayed a long way off of Open Source Way when a proprietary vendor sees fit to step in and fix a mess Red Hat’s created in a way that honors the spirit of open source, which is something that Red Hat no longer seems to know how to do.
Elementary OS 8: Beauty and the Flatpak Beast — With Screenshots: The last time our Christine Hall reviewed a Linux distribution was in February, 2023 when she reviewed Elementary OS 7 for DistroWatch. It only made sense that when she decided to write a review again, it would be of Elementary 8. That must have primed her reviewing pump, however. Next week she’s promised another distro review.
Gin Landers is an intern covering open-source technology for FOSS Force.
