LWN: 2000 Linux timeline

February, 2000

I saw that the whole business of typesetting was being held back by proprietary interests, and I didn't need any claim to fame. I had already been successful with my books and so I didn't have to stake it all on anything. So it didn't matter to me whether or not whether I got anything financial out of [TeX].
Donald E. Knuth, from an interview by Advogato

Linus releases development kernel 2.3.47. This release includes devfs support thanks to the determination and persistence of Richard Gooch. The devfs inclusion brought an end to a multi-year flame war.

The kernel.org FTP/web site and its mirrors begin hosting cryptographic software which is seen as a significant next step towards including cryptographic code in the Linux kernel. This policy is the result of the recent change in U.S. export regulations.

The Trillian project releases its code for Intel's 64-bit Itanium chip to the open-source community. The Itanium is still months away from release by Intel. Red Hat, Inc. subsequently announces the immediate public availability of GNUPro tools for IA-64.

Continued distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks inspire Jens Hektor to backport features from the Linux v2.3 ipfilter package to augment the capabilities of the Linux v2.2 kernel. In addition, Dragos Ruiu makes a klog patch available to provide "a quick and dirty forensic logger to track down or follow the path to the origin of attacks".

...I think the fight we are now fighting is a very important fight for free speech and for the open source community. ... if reverse engineering is banned, then a lot of the open source community is doomed to fail. -- LinuxWorld interview with Jon Johansen.

UCITA is a proposed law, designed by the proprietary software developers, who are now asking all 50 states of the US to adopt it. If UCITA is adopted, it will threaten the free software community(1) with disaster.
-- Richard Stallman, Feb 6, 2000
Copyleft donates $10,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to aid the legal defense being mounted by the EFF in response to lawsuits by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA).

The IEEE publishes a "Position paper" opposing states' adoption of UCITA. It provides a nice, concise summary of the problems with this bill which has already passed the Virginia legislature with a unanimous vote.

Tobias Hoevekamp writes about the European Union's "Framework Programme 5," a 3.6 billion Euro effort to improve the competitiveness of the European software industry. The program recognizes open source software and money is available for projects which advance the program's objectives.

Veteran RTLinux hacker Victor Yodaiken in this posting describes plans for his patent number 5995745 on the RTLinux concept.

For the moment, it appears many IT managers are making sensible decisions about integrating Linux: Where it works, they're either using it or looking into giving it a try.
-- Eve Epstein for Infoworld
The latest IDC report, as quoted in News.com now ranks Linux as the "second-most-popular operating system for server computers" with 25% of the server operating system sales in 1999. Windows NT is first with 38% and Netware ranks 3rd with 19%. IDC previously predicted that Linux would get up to the number two position - in 2002 or 2003. The revolution appears to be well ahead of schedule.

The latest Netcraft report turns up over 11 million sites - and 58% of them are running apache.

Eazel, Inc announces that Michael Boich, Andy Hertzfeld and Bud Tribble, all of whom were part of the original Apple Macintosh team, joined Eazel to work on making Linux accessible to mainstream desktop users.

Given the huge rises in Linux companies' shares in 1999, we can expect about 10 initial public offerings from open-source companies this year.
-- Mike Kwatinetz, head of technology research at Credit Suisse First Boston
Late January and February hosts a flurry of mergers and acquisitions including:

VA Linux Systems acquisition of Andover.net in a high-profile purchase that values Andover shares at 0.425 VA's, or roughly $50/share. Salon Magazine coveres the acquisition in this article while WebMonkey condemns it here.
Atipa's announcement of its purchase of Enhanced Software Technologies, the makers of the BRU backup utility.
Corel's announcement of an anticipated merger with Inprise/Borland inspired articles in Wired News, PC World, (of course) LWN and many others.
LinuxMall.com and Frank Kaspar and Associates also have made plans to merge. LinuxMall.com has been at the top of the retail side of Linux almost since the very beginning; Kaspar, instead, is one of the largest distribution channels.
Lineo announces the acquisition of Zentropix. Zentropix has a track record and background in supporting real-time Linux.

The Linux Fund on the IPO path The Linux Fund announces that it will do an initial public offering of its stock soon. (The LinuxFund IPO was never even filed in 2000.)

How will the Linux community change as a result of this flood of cash, jobs, and stock options? When everybody who wants to has made their deal, will the volunteer spirit remain? At LinuxWorld a year ago, the .org area was known as "the ghetto." This time around, your editor heard it referred to as "acquisition alley" instead. Times have changed.
Jonathan Corbet for LWN.net
The LinuxWorld 2000 trade show arrives in New York City. The Linux world is changing quickly, and there is no better summary of what's up - at least on the business side - than LWN's LinuxWorld summary. Also see this ZDNet article for a round-up of the barrage of press releases that accompanies the show.

Linux Expo/LinuxWorld Paris was held at the same time as the New York event.

XFree86 wins the IDG/Linus Torvalds Award, check included, at LinuxWorld 2000 in New York City.

Advanstar Communications announces a deal with the Linux Journal to create a set of Linux events beginning with "Linux Canada," May 15-20, 2000 in Toronto.

Red Hat wins InfoWorld's "Product of the Year" award for the fourth time in a row...

Red Hat sells 4 million shares at $95/share in a secondary offering. Of the shares sold, 2.75 million were issued by the company, and 1.25 million were sold by insiders.

Red Hat software's Bob Young receives Business Leader magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year award at the 16th Conference on Entrepreneurship.

IBM makes code to its Journaled File System (JFS) available to the Linux community by releasing it under the GPL.

Sun releases NFS v4 component source code under the Sun Industry Standards Source License which is "designed to meet the requirements of the Open Source Definition as articulated by the Open Source Initiative." But Eric Raymond isn't immediately satisfied with Sun's new license. Welcome elements of the announcement include increased funding for a project to develop a Linux NFS v4 implementation and the release of Sun's rights on the NFS trademark,

The Linux/PPC Developers announce release 1.1 of their Reference Release designed for use as the basis of other PowerPC Linux distributions.

The first stable release of the Linux port of OpenSSH (version 1.2.2) is announced.

WorldPilot 1.0 is released. WorldPilot is a free personal information management system based on Zope.

CMU Sphinx is transitioned to open source with a BSD-style license. The first component to be released is a speech recognizer and library, suitable for real-time applications.

IBM's port of Linux to the S/390 is available for download. LinuxPlanet subsequently takes a look at Linux on the IBM S/390 mainframe to find that it is here and it is looking good.

SOT announces that it will release an English version of its Best Linux distribution at CeBIT. Best Linux is is a popular distribution out of Finland.

LinuxDevices announces the results from its survey, Which Linux distribution(s) will you use?. A large split showed up between the distributions that have been used for embedded systems up until now and the ones that people expect to use in the future.
As I mentioned yesterday, venture capital is a major topic in this year's conference. The morning keynote speaker was Hadar Pedhazur, the initial major investor in Digital Creations, the creators of Zope. A year ago, Pedhazur advised Digital Creations to make its software Open Source, much against the initial impulses of the Digital Creations principals.
Frank Willison reporting on the Eighth International Python Conference

Embedded versions of Linux are popular this month as:

MontaVista releases Hard Hat Linux 1.0. It is a completely open source embedded version of the OS, and thus carries no royalties.
Lynx Real-Time releases BlackCat Linux 1.0, the first release of its embedded Linux distribution.
EMJ Embedded Systems announces White Dwarf Linux - yet another distribution for embedded systems applications.

TurboLinux announces the availability of TurboLinux 6.0 in both workstation and server versions.

Corel announces that the first beta version of Word Perfect Office 2000 has gone to the beta test sites.

David Hoggan's The Internet Book is made available on-line and under a liberal copyright, allowing both reproduction and electronic transmission (with proper credit). "'The Internet Book: Introduction And Reference' provides both an introduction to the internet protocol suite and a reference guide in a single volume."

O'Reilly Network announces the launch of two new sites, a technical portal, http://www.oreillynet.com and a LinuxDev center, http://oreilly.linux.com.

Guardian Digital announces LinuxSecurity.com a "pro-Linux and Open Source site that strives to provide objective and helpful information for the general Linux and Open Source community."

OpenSales, Inc. names Oracle and Netscape veteran Bonnie Crater as president and CEO. Later this year OpenSales will change its name to Zelerate.

Nicholas Petreley resigns as Editorial Director for LinuxWorld, though he will continue to write a column for them, to focus his time on the Linux Standard Base.

Jim Pick, the guy behind kernelnotes.org, is hired to be the new webmaster at kernel.org.

The KDE and CMU Sphinx projects announce they are moving to SourceForge. A substantial part of Larry Augustin's LinuxWorld keynote is devoted to SourceForge

Brave Gnu World celebrates its first anniversary. Congratulations to author Georg Greve!

January <== Timeline Home ==> March