Guest: Hilary Carter (LinkedIn)
Organization: Linux Foundation (Twitter)
Show: 2024 Prediction Series

We are living in an uncertain time and open source is no exception with members of the community facing numerous challenges. The Linux Foundation aims to be a resource to help solve some of these challenges. “Whatever we can do to nurture developer ecosystems is where we’ll be focusing much of our efforts,” says Hilary Carter, SVP of Research and Communications at Linux Foundation as she shares her 2024 predictions.

OpenTofu, which was born out of some of the challenges the community went through in 2023, is going to be beneficial to open source in 2024. It is disseminating the value proposition around open governance and license considerations for trusted technologies where governance is truly open. Decision-makers are more informed on the risks when open technologies are not truly openly governed. Similarly, there has been a lot of discussion around the benefits of open-source LLMs to foster trust.

In the public sector, the challenges from 2023 around regulations such as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) have been beneficial as they provided an opportunity to make a case for open source, its benefits, and how it relates to the sustainable development of technology. The Cyber Resilience Act made a case for why regulation needs to be responsible and inclusive of all the stakeholders from the original drafting of a regulation. As a result, the community learned how to collaborate better.

From a private sector perspective, in industries like manufacturing and healthcare, there is a need for greater trust, transparency, and traceability of parts and services. Digital trust is key to improving these industries with digital supply chains and the provenance of parts that are certified. Mandates from governments to improve processes and transparency prompt industries to rethink how they do things. Both healthcare and manufacturing can benefit from greater open source collaboration and this will be a key theme in 2024.

Some of the challenges we are seeing in generative AI are around copyright and intellectual property. One of the projects Linux Foundation is hosting to help solve this challenge is going to be particularly relevant in 2024 with the US and European Parliament elections where being able to certify political content for the campaigns is crucial. The Coalition For Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is a set of standards allowing users and creators to have greater certainty around the provenance of content from different media. It will help create trust in generative AI and the content online in the coming year.

The blockchain industry has overcome a difficult time with the demise of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX but it is clear that digital assets and digital currencies are here to stay. In 2024, we will see more activity around them and how digital assets relate to open source. The Linux Foundation will continue to sustain communities in these areas following initiatives with Circle, a payments company, and FinTech company, Block to help accelerate standards for open payments. It is predicted that blockchains are going to remain in the headlines throughout 2024 and many conversations about digital assets in the modern economy.

Open source security will also remain a key focus for Linux Foundation and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) in the coming year. They will continue to collaborate with lots of parties, working with organizations to help them embrace the tools and practices that support the programming that is making advancements in this area. Linux Foundation Research will continue to publish reports and they will be working with Harvard’s Laboratory for Innovation Science on Census III. Other research will be conducted around cyber education and looking at how they can ensure their learners across all channels have the best possible opportunity to think differently about software security.

Linux Foundation will be focusing on working with their developer communities and providing them with the best resources, tooling, practices, events, and educational resources through 2024. Continuing to nurture developer ecosystems will be a top priority.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.