LWN: 2000 Linux timeline

December, 2000

Hewlett-Packard is taking out cheap insurance with its hiring of open-source advocate Bruce Perens, just in case Linux becomes more of a force in the marketplace than anyone expects. Users negotiating with HP can use this new commitment to Linux as a ploy in negotiations, but they should not expect HP to develop Linux into a replacement for HP-UX.
-- Wisdom from the Meta Group via News.com

Bruce Perens moves to HP, putting an end to his career as a Linux venture capitalist.

The Debian new maintainer process draws complaints for its length and slowness. Not everybody agrees that it is a problem, however; some do not want it to be easy to become a Debian maintainer.

Conectiva 6.0 is released (announcement here). Among other things, it includes a version of Debian's Advanced Package Tool (apt) modified to work with RPM.

Debian 2.2r2 is released (announcement here).

OpenBSD 2.8 is released (yes, announcement here).

Mailman 2.0 is released (announcement here).

Red Hat claims a 40% market share in Japan with Red Hat 7. Meanwhile...

MandrakeSoft claims a 29% market share in the U.S., beating Red Hat for the number one spot by one percentage point.
Call us cynical, but the choice of Gnome/Nautilus is what you'd expect if you dragged a trainee PR intern off the street, and threatened to hit them with a rock until they came up with two leading open source names. This really is strategy dictated by short-haul in-flight magazines.
-- The Register was not impressed.

Sun Microsystems releases the source to Solaris 8, albeit under a non-free license.

Dell and Eazel announce a partnership (announcement here). Dell will ship Eazel's code on its Linux-installed systems, and also makes an equity investment in the firm.

SuSE and SGI announce a partnership which involves SGI taking an equity investment in SuSE (announcement here).

IBM sells an S/390 running SuSE Linux to Telia, replacing a network of 70 Sun servers.

VA Linux Systems launches SourceForge OnSite, wherein customers can rent a SourceForge-like system for their internal networks (announcement here).

CodeWeavers launches its Wine development site at wine.codeweavers.com.

FreeDesktop.org launches its window manager specification; it is the result of a cooperative effort between GNOME and KDE developers (announcement here).

Great Bridge launches its boxed PostgreSQL distribution, along with a series of service and support offerings (announcement here).

NuSphere launches its boxed MySQL distribution, along with a series of service and support offerings (announcement here).

CodeWeavers announces its preview version of CodeWeavers Wine, along with a series of service and support offerings. The boxed set will have to wait until 1.0.

The m-o-o-t project launches with a plan to create a secure distribution that uses storage in remote data havens and is immune to various governmental snooping initiatives (home page here).
Ahh.. The challenge is out! You and me. Mano a mano.
-- Linus takes the challenge.

Alan Cox releases stable kernel 2.2.18, and declares that 2.2.19 will emphasize virtual memory and be faster than 2.4.0.

Numerous Linux distributions fail to boot on Pentium 4 processors. Distributors rush out patches...

NetBSD 1.5 is released (announcement here).

Mozilla 0.6 is released (release notes here).

Linux Professional Institute certificates begin to ship two years after the LPI's beginning in the fall of 1998.

IBM announces plans to invest $1 billion in Linux in 2001.

IBM installs a 1024 node Linux cluster for Shell (announcement here).
If anyone had told me back then that getting back to embarrassingly primitive Unix would be the great hope and investment obsession of the year 2000, merely because its name was changed to Linux and its source code was opened up again, I never would have had the stomach or the heart to continue in computer science.
-- Jaron Lanier actually likes open source... (Upside).

Sun Microsystems completes its acquisition of Cobalt Networks (announcement here).

IBM sponsors LinuxLab.dk, based at the IT University of Copenhagen (announcement here).

Debian inaugurates its new testing branch, which is intended to be kept always in an "almost releasable" state. The "woody" unstable branch becomes "testing", and a new unstable branch begins.

Red Hat releases an Itanium beta of its distribution (announcement here).

Sendmail, Inc. acquires Nascent Technologies (announcement here).

The LWN.net Linux Stock Index falls into the 30's, as part of the general disaster in the stock market. It peaked, remember, at 199 in January.

British Telecom files suit against Prodigy Communications, alleging infringement of its alleged patent on hyperlinks.

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