Well, it lays before us like a kind of year in the future or something. To get the diaries kicked off for the year ahead - since no-one has posted anything since November - here are my predictions and hopes for the next twelve months.

1. The Free Software community will focus much more on security. We've been resting on our not-insubstantial laurels. More GNU/Linux distros will sign (and check ;) packages, and efforts to bring in NX-style technology in an attempt to head off Microsoft will happen. Frameworks for installing secure services without bizarro chroot systems and all the trouble they entail will be built. Our world will be more secure, and all our users will be happy
2. Microsoft will bring out XP service pack 2 with NX technology and firewalls in a bid to be more secure, and will break thousands of apps and piss off lots of users. Microsoft engineers will view our green grass with envy.
3. The British Broadcasting Corporation will ride into Multimediaville bearing gifts for the Free Software community. In particular, they will save our collective asses by giving us a video system that is useful and Free. They won't go as far as giving us a good Flash plugin though.
4. Linux will not only arrive on the desktop, it will stay around for lunch and then leave again because it's got a train to catch. The kernel will be integrated into the desktop in unforeseen ways, and will rid us of warts such as fam.
5. Support for graphical operation will blossom, much like free software web browsers. For ages we've been stuck with Netscape/XFree86, but there will be others. An embarrassment of riches will be ours. But they will all still run X, and still be networkable, just to annoy the Slashdot trolls who believe that is what is causing their video card to be slow / RAM to be full / armpits to smell.
6. People will actually start using Apache 2 out in the wild. On real web servers.
7. SUSE will switch to Gnome as their default desktop, igniting the Mother Of All Desktop Wars. There will be few survivors.
8. More and more development groups will start up "Planet <project>" sites (like Planet Gnome, Planet Debian, Monologue, etc.), where all the blogs of the various developers will be assimilated, and these will form a kind of internal voice for discussion. Metacretins will seize this work, culminating in the eventual design of "Planet Planet", an aggregation of all the blog aggregates.
9. The design for Perl 6 will be mostly completed, and will leave people salivating for the goodness it will bring. However, it won't be until 2005 that we see any Perl 6 prototypes that work in any real sense.

That's yer lot. No, it's not hugely serious.