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See also: last week's Linux History page.

This week in Linux history


Three years ago (April 16, 1998 LWN): The U.S. Postal Service announced that it was using Linux.

Eric S. Raymond released Homesteading the Noosphere

Salon's Andrew Leonard interviewed Eric Raymond.

The first time I met Eric Raymond, the co-author of "The New Hacker's Dictionary," he flamed me hairless after I sent him e-mail seeking clarification of a point of research for a project I was working on.

LWN started its Daily Updates page.

Apache was named Network Magazine's web server product of the year.

Slashdot carried an editorial by Peter de Vries on why he believes that Microsoft will decline in the future.

The very fact that so much attention has been given to Department of Justice's probe into Microsoft should be an indication that the corporate world is waking up to the state of the computer industry. Why do I single out corporate interests in particular? Because most major transitions in computing technology have been foreshadowed in the corporate marketplace long before "six pack joe" realized what the next "wave" was going to be. The purchasing decisions made by corporations help form the personal preferences of their employees. These decisions also effect what products are taught (and therefore promoted) in educational environments.

The current development kernel version was 2.1.96 which was mostly bug-fix release, with a new aic7xxx SCSI driver.

Miguel de Icaza sent us a GNOME status report. GNOME was coming along quickly.

Guido van Rossum announced the release of Python 1.5.1

Steve Savitzky introduced the first song written under the FGPL (Filk General Public License).

Those Looking for GPL'd or otherwise public software for CAD didn't have many options. The gEDA, the GNU Electronic Design Automation project was in version 0.0.1 then. It has come a long way since then.

The Freely redistributable software in business page, an Australian-based collection of resources for businesses was listed as a "Link of the Week". This is still a good resource though it hasn't been updated for almost a year.

Two years ago (April 15, 1999 LWN): Mindcraft published a Microsoft-funded study which was hotly debated by pretty much everyone except Microsoft. They found:

Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 is 2.5 times faster than Linux as a File Server and 3.7 times faster as a Web Server.

Later they admitted:

Mindcraft made some Linux configuration and tuning mistakes in this benchmark. However, the original results and the Open Benchmark results are close.

The Capital Research Center came out against free software and issued this rather lengthy report. While the real target was Ralph Nader they went after free software as one of his causes.

The letter is evidence of Nader's commitment to "free software," a radical concept that will remove most software from the store shelves if the concept succeeds. The thinking goes that software developers will voluntarily create and improve software products. The "source code" or basic recipe for each program will be released the general public, essentially draining all economic value from the product itself.

...

But what happens when the OSS method of production is applied to thousands of software applications with millions of users requiring product support and attention to their particular needs? How do consumers identify the products they need when software is constantly evolving and there are no standard products that enable users to share compatible information? The 'free' nature of OSS quickly collapses into chaos.

The Linux FreeS/WAN project issued a press release covering FreeS/WAN version 1.0. FreeS/WAN is now in version 1.9.

Break-ins based on ftp were on the rise. Anonymous ftp users were advised to use the latest version available, and to check configurations carefully. In particular users were advised to add "no dirs" to the upload line of their ftpaccess file.

An NFSv3 client implementation for Linux was released by Trond Myklebust. This release moved Linux into current NFS technology. The initial release was, of course, for the adventurous only.

IBM Thinkpad users received another resource, the IBM Thinkpad page.

Some updates to UltraPenguin (a version of Red Hat for UltraSparc systems) were announced.

A Python-based 3D role playing game engine, the PyRPG project, announced their 0.0.1 release.

The first full release of Fnorb, version 1.0 had just been announced. Fnorb is a Python-based CORBA ORB.

Chris Nelson wrote Mozilla's Open Source Success.

Mozilla *was* a first in the industry, and it is wrong to judge it by the success of previous Open Source efforts.

This article on WebMonkey is also about Mozilla's successes and about the Gecko browser, too.

As we arrived at the recent Mozilla party in San Francisco, ostensibly to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Netscape's open source project, we felt a bit hesitant: Would this be a birthday party ... or a funeral? After all, new owner AOL had laid off 400 of its recently acquired Netscape employees the previous day. And then, just hours before the party, word spread that the party's host, Mozilla evangelist Jamie Zawinski, had resigned. We worried that we'd spend the night crying into our smart drinks.

Silly us. The Sound Factory was packed to overflowing by 10 p.m., and Mozilla fans danced and networked until security eased everyone out the door at well past 2 a.m. Even Zawinski was smiling. And much of the talk (when we could hear one another) revolved around Web developers' high hopes for Gecko, the all-new layout engine being previewed on Netscape's Web site.

Here is an open letter to Microsoft from Eric Raymond, Larry Augustin, Russell Nelson, L. Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, and Guido Van Rossum, regarding the murmurings that they might open up some of the Windows source. Although the letter was titled "from the Open Source Community", other members of the community objected and the signatories of the letter did not intend to represent anybody but themselves.

We'd like to remind Microsoft that (as Jamie Zawinski put it recently in his Mozilla resignation announcement) open source is not magic pixie dust. Code that's badly designed or non-functional won't instantly improve simply by being open-sourced.

John Dvorak asked What's Going On at Microsoft? in this ZDNet article. He suggested that Microsoft should "embrace and extend Linux."

Nobody writing in the popular press wants to predict the emergence of a gentrified Linux as the next major change on the desktop environment or in the Fortune 500. Well, I'm doing so now. The way I see it, Linux's code base is under much tighter control than Windows'. I've talked to too many ex-Microsoft folk who all tell me that nobody has a handle on Windows' code. It's completely out of control--a hodgepodge of objects and subsystems nobody fully understands. Though this may or may not be true, things are different with Linux.

Sub-$500 Linux computers were available from TheLinuxStore. It even looked like a reasonably configured system, lacking only the monitor to be truly usable. You won't find those anymore. TheLinuxStore was new then, and its opening was covered by News.com.

Responding to criticisms that the Linux interface isn't yet easy enough to use, [chief information officer John] Wise said, "I don't think people have taken a look at the KDE interface," which is stable, easy to use, and looks like Windows.

In addition, the Gnome user interface is looking increasingly promising, he said.

Meanwhile at the other end of the scale, Penguin Computing announced an eight-processor Linux server system.

Eric Raymond told us he was spending his vacation putting out a new version of the Jargon File. As he put it:

A browse through the Jargon File is like a voyage of rediscovery. These are the Linux culture's roots.

One year ago (April 13, 2000 LWN): LWN lead this edition with an editorial about "the subversive power of free software". The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UTICA) had just passed in the state of Maryland. There were ongoing issues with the DVD and "cphack" affairs. The Freenet project and the Gnutella project were both looking like they might allow 21st century subversives to build an infrastructure that would help keep future cats out of the bag. Upside talked with FSF's lawyer Eben Moglen about the "Popular revolt for freeware".

While such legal activity might seem tangentially related to the world of Gnu/Linux operating systems, for a growing number of concerned observers, Moglen included, the recent spate of legal challenges represent yet another curious piece in an as-yet-unassembled puzzle.

---

"We -- the free software community -- are sitting in the very intersection these corporations need to come through, barreling toward this splendid paradise they've envisioned of a seamless Internet where purchased content is delivered in a secure pipeline directly from producer to user," Moglen says.

Linuxcare delayed [and later canceled] its IPO.

SecurityFocus.com had just set up a Linux focus area with information of interest to Linux users.

Intel Corporation announced it would release the code for its Common Data Security Architecture (CDSA) software.

The 2.3.99-pre5 development kernel had just been released, fixing a "brown paper bag" problem in the filesystem code of 2.3.99-pre4, which caused it to crash on boot.

Wichert Akkerman released doc-central, a system for browsing Debian's documentation with a web browser.

MontaVista Software ported Hard Hat Linux to IBM's PowerPC 405GP processor. MontaVista was also working with Applied Data Systems to port Hard Hat Linux to the Intel StrongARM SA-1110 platform.

The Linux Documentation Project had just reworked its website and was going strong.

Garbage collection was added to Python.

IDC declared Linux to be red hot in the server market. Server shipments grew 166% between the fourth quarters of 1998 and 1999.

In a recent IDC survey of 200 Linux users ... the majority of participants estimated that their Linux servers offered at least 4 9s in availability, which translates to less than one hour of unexpected downtime per year.

BigStorage Inc. announced its sponsorship in the ReiserFS filesystem project.

Dallas Semiconductor announced a Linux powered voting booth which used Dallas Internet components. Using iButtons and computer chips in stainless steel cans this voting booth provided registered, private ballots, and a Tiny InterNet Interface (TINI) relayed real-time voting results over a live network. They could have used a few of these in Florida during the last presidential election.

Further demonstrating the flexibility of the iButton/TINI technology, the "central server" in this election is nothing more than a laptop running Linux.

The first Colorado Linux Info Quest (CLIQ) was the subject of a Linux Advocate column by Scott Dowdle.

First off, I love Larry [McVoy]. He is cool. He is funny. He is blunt. He is honest. Did I mention he is funny? Ok, anyway... Mr. McVoy gave a speech (like the PHP guy) on what you would think would be a very dry topic... how to scale Linux to the Enterprise. Larry reminds me of Norm McDonald. Do you know who Norm McDonald is? If not, he was the 'Fake News Guy' on Saturday Night Live for a couple of years before he got fired and got his own sitcom.

News.com looked at the life-after-death of gnutella and other open source Napster clones.

Whatever the outcome of the Napster lawsuit, the open-source Gnutella movement may well prove to be the more dangerous branch of the file-swapping technology trend. Because Napster runs through only a few central servers, it is an easy target for lawyers seeking to shut down the service or for those looking for individuals swapping files through the Napster software. Gnutella has no central location. It's modeled after the way the Internet itself is connected:


April 12, 2001

 

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