See also: last week's Linux History page.

This week in Linux history

Three years ago (November 5, 1998 LWN): The first of the infamous Halloween memos from Microsoft was leaked to the public. See this week's front page for more details.

The Linux 2.2 kernel was poised for release, but the NFS implementation was known to be substandard. This problem has plagued Linux for a long time. That problem was finally corrected - two years later.

Matthew Szulik became President of Red Hat. That was the beginning of the change of guard, with the gradual departure of most of the Red Hat founders from the very top. Here's the current Red Hat Executive bios.

Red Hat 5.2 was announced. LWN's impressions of the release were mostly positive, but it contained so many security-related bugs and unnecessary setuid programs that Chris Evans set up a website just to track them and harass Red Hat to fix them. That website survived through the Red Hat 6.0 release and its subsequent series of updates, but now reports "no known issues".

The Debian 2.1 freeze began. Debian 2.1 was finally released four months later, in early March, 1999.

Supercomputing 1998 hosted Beowulf talks for the first time. This year SC 2001 begins on November 10, 2001 with the 3rd Annual Beowulf Bash on November 12th.

And, not to be forgotten, Worldforge, a project to develop a complete system for massive multiplayer on-line role-playing games, came into being. They celebrated their first birthday a year later.

Two years ago (November 4, 1999 LWN): The DeCSS source code was made publicly available. The repercussions from this are ongoing. The curtailment of free speech peaked with a federal judge ruling that linking to a site that contained the source code was also prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Things have not really improved on that front.

Last year, Don Marti and others organized Burn All GIFs day, an event planned to eliminate all GIFs on the Internet, in protest of the Unisys patent. Many GIFs went away, including some on the LWN site, but many, many more remain. Unisys has never tried to enforce its patent.

64GB memory on the IA-32 became a reality! Support for up to 64GB of memory slipped into the 2.3 kernel series, courtesy of Ingo Molnar. This removed an embarrassing limitation of the Linux kernel. Each individual process, though, can only use up to 4GB of virtual memory.

Red Hat announced the Red Hat Center for Open Source. Money for the new center was donated, in cash and stock, by Red Hat and three of the initial founders. The Red Hat Center has focused primarily on awarding grants for activities to entities such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While Red Hat's Bob Young and Marc Ewing remain on the current board, the renamed Center for the Public Domain is somewhat divorced from Red Hat.

Slackware 7.0 was announced. Patrick Volkerding also explained his decision to "join the crowd" and jump Slackware from 4.0 to 7.0.

The planned feature freeze for Debian 2.2 was postponed, finally occurring almost three months later, in January of 2000. The official release of Debian 2.2 happened eight months after that, in August this year.

LinuxDevices.com was launched. LinuxDevices celebrates with this 2001 Halloween Memo.

At the time when LinuxDevices.com was launched, the use of Linux as an embedded operating system was virtually unheard of. Lineo, MontaVista, and Zentropix (who all participated in the announcement of the site's launch) had barely announced themselves as sources of embeddable versions of Linux, and Embedded Linux hadn't yet arrived on the radar screens of embedded market analysts like VDC, IDC, and EDC.

In short, two years ago the "Embedded Linux Market" simply didn't exist.

One year ago (November 2, 2000 LWN): The Python team got out from under BeOpen's corporate umbrella and moved to Digital Creations. Digital Creations, now called Zope Corporation, has proved to be a good home for Python Labs. After all, Zope Corporation's premier product, Zope, is the Python-based, open source web application. Zope Corp. remains the sponsor of Python Labs, but with the move, a newly formed non-profit organization (the "Python Software Foundation") was also created to hold the copyrights to the core Python code.

Turbolinux Inc. filed for IPO, however they remain a privately held company.

The current development kernel release was 2.4.0-test10. A 2.4.0 kernel seemed as close then as a 2.5.0 kernel seems now.

A Princeton team cracked SDMI.

Q. Still, wouldn't it have been better for opponents of SDMI if you let SDMI go ahead and deploy a flawed technology, so music lovers could teach them a lesson by copying music despite the technology?

Of course not. This is scientific research: it is not our goal to engage in tactics such as tricking the industry into choosing a flawed system. Our goal is simply to analyze security systems and share our results openly with the scientific community.

Again, researchers who crack cryptosystems and security systems are not motivated by a desire to exploit these flaws later. They are merely subjecting systems to analysis, motivated instead by a desire to increase the existing body of knowledge about security systems.

Secondly, if the technology is cracked in deployment, rather than on the drawing board, everyone loses to some extent. The recording industry obviously, device manufacturers most certainly, but even opponents of SDMI. Even pirates! To an opponent of SDMI, even a broken, circumventable SDMI system is worse than no SDMI system at all.

Finally, see below. The DMCA may have prohibited analysis outside the challenge deadline. -- Princeton team FAQ

The first Progeny Linux Beta shipped.

Trolltech announced they were going to add GPL licensing to Qt/Embedded.

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol.

LWN Linux Timelines
1998 In Review
1999 In Review
2000 In Review
2001 In Review

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