Opinion

Prognostications for 2026

David Both

The advent of a new year always seems to give us an excuse to inflict our opinions about what we expect — or hope — will take place in the coming year. We at Both.org are no exception, so we’ve pulled together a list of our own conjectures for 2026.

David Both

  1. The weight of the massive marketing hype about AI will finally cause it to collapse as the number of high-profile failures and outright disasters highlight the fact that there’s still no such thing as AI. Just ignore the man behind the curtain.
  2. The Windows 10 migration debacle for Microsoft will continue to force large numbers of users to at least try Linux. Most of those users will end up making the switch permanent.
  3. Conversely, Microsoft will continue to push its operating system business into the background as it’s subscription services drive revenue growth. They only need Windows to work well enough to connect to their cloud-based offerings. They’ve already dumped many of their programmers in an orgy of bean-counter delight.

AmyJune Hineline

  1. Open source projects will push back on being treated as training data. More communities will set clearer boundaries around how their work can be used in AI systems and commercial models.
  2. Non-code contributions will gain more formal recognition. Documentation, accessibility work, facilitation, and community management will be treated as core project infrastructure rather than optional or secondary contributions.

Don Watkins

  1. Linux continues to gain popularity on the desktop following Microsoft’s planned release of Windows 12 beta in 2027.
  2. Ubuntu will release an AI-focused spin of its distribution.
  3. Enterprise Linux distributions continue to proliferate, with Alma Linux leading the way.
  4. Rust will continue its rise as a systems programming language, gaining traction in security-sensitive areas.
  5. Open source will become more central to AI expansion and innovation.
  6. Open licensing models will continue to proliferate and challenge the Open Source Institute’s leadership.

Jim Hall

I think 2026 will see a big dip in AI. I don’t think this will be a market crash; there are too many big companies that rely on AI for that to happen. Instead, if you follow the Gartner Hype Cycle model, new technologies usually go through a phase of “inflated expectations” followed by a “trough of disillusionment.”

We’ve been living in “inflated expectations” but as 2025 winds down, I am seeing more and more examples of Generative AI approaching a “trough.” Organizations are starting to realize that Gen AI wasn’t doing what it was hyped to do, others aren’t seeing the return on the investment, and some are starting to experience real pain from deploying Gen AI without having thought it through.

I predict that the “trough” will happen in 2026, and we’ll see a bunch of companies that had been hyping Gen AI in 2025 stop doing that in 2026. It’s not a collapse, but a “correction.

Maybe that’s not a prediction, but a “hope” that Gen AI will start to wind down and settle into a new “normal” mode. That’s the “slope of enlightenment” and “plateau of productivity” when organizations
finally realize what works vs what doesn’t, and we won’t have “Gen AI in everything” just because it’s AI.

In,

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