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July, 2000

In a world of NDA-bound business agreements, Debian is an open book. In a world of mission statements, Debian has a Social Contract. At a time when commercial distributors are striving to see how much proprietary software they can pack into a box of Linux, Debian remains the bastion of software freedom -- living proof that you can have a fully functional and usable operating system without needing any proprietary code. -- Evan Leibovitch in this article for ZDNet

Sun announces that StarOffice is to be released under the GPL. The code is going to be reworked, integrated with Bonobo and GTK, and released as a set of reusable components. StarOffice will also be reworked to use a set of open, XML-based file formats.

Larry Wall and Nathan Torkington announce plans for a complete rewrite for Perl 6. Perl will also be moving from following Larry Wall's vision to becoming a community-driven development effort.

Testimony concludes in the the 2600 case. 2600 Magazine is being sued by the MPAA in the form of Universal City Studios for having mirrored the DeCSS code.

The ACLU sends a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FBI, asking for details on the "cybersnoop" programs, Carnivore, Omnivore and Etherpeek.

Siegmar Mosdorf, German Secretary of State in the Federal Ministry for Economy and Technology, voiced his government's support for Open Source at last week's LinuxTag conference. "I am convinced that open source development can form the European base model in the information age."

The AT&T Publius project is announced. Publius is another effort similar to Freenet and Gnutella, that seek to build a distributed system for the distribution of content of any kind, including software or articles that might otherwise be banned. The name Publius was chosen because it was one of the pen names used by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison to anonymously publish the Federalist Papers.

Oracle's Linux based "Internet appliance" system hits the shelves. The "New Internet Computer" (NIC) is the latest result of Larry Ellison's long personal crusade to make non-Microsoft systems available to the world. It's aimed at people who only want access to the net; as such, it's essentially a $199 (without monitor) X terminal.

The Linux movement has been independent of anything Microsoft is doing. It's one of those cosmic movements in the industry, like the emergence of the Internet, or microprocessors. -- Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM VP for technology and strategy, in this interview with InformationWeek

IBM announces plans to spend $200 million over four years to make it easier for European companies to bring its software to Linux as covered in this article from cnet News.com.

Reports first appear that SCO may be purchased by Caldera, such as this ZDNet article. Later in 2000 Caldera and SCO do announce their intent for Caldera International to be formed from Caldera's existing operation and two of SCO's three divisions.

Red Hat, Inc announces the promised release of Source Navigator under the GPL license.

Add the numbers together, and you quickly get the sense that last year's IPO frenzy, while disappointing from an investment perspective, has served its ultimate purpose. By giving early front-runners a chance to separate themselves from the rest of the pack, the stock market has effectively narrowed the future commercial Linux market down to four main runners... -- Sam Williams writing for Upside in this article

Red Hat is running on 72% of the Linux servers in a June 2000 Netcraft web server survey according to this press release.

Red Hat's chief financial officer, Harold Covert, resigns. Mr. Covert moves on to a new job as CFO at SGI after less than five months in this position at Red Hat.

The news site Kuro5hin, is temporarily forced off the net by a sustained series of denial of service attacks. Fortunately, the vandals didn't succeed and Kuro5hin is still with us at the end of 2000.

Volunteers at SecurityFocus offer vulnerability reporting assistance free of charge, and, they promise, no-strings-attached. This generosity was prompted by record-levels of vulnerability reports, and the erratic quality of some of them.

The DevelopVNC website launches to serve the virtual network computing (VNC) developer community.

Plans to launch Real Time Linux Consortium are announced in this article on LinuxDevices.com. "The RTL community expressed their interest in a uniform and standardized API which they can rely on."

SSH 1.2.30 is released with a new restrictive license that no longer allows free commercial use. There is a free software alternative available, OpenSSH, from the folks at OpenBSD.

DemoLinux 2.0 is announced. DemoLinux 1.0 was based on Linux-Mandrake. The new version, 2.0, is based on Debian instead. It is a Linux distribution on a CDROM that runs Linux without installation, disk partitioning, or other hassles.

As promised, Borland/Inprise releases the InterBase 6.0 source code under a variant on the Mozilla Public License (MPL) V1.1.

The pSOS community is given a new Linux choice with Montavista's announcement of an open source pSOS-to-Linux transition kit, to aid in moving from the pSOS proprietary embedded operating system to Linux.

Version 1.0 of the FreePascal compiler is now available.

Aquarium, a new open-source web site development framework, is now available. The license for Aquarium is modeled after the BSD license.

Go.com releases several of its development tools under an Open Source license, similar to the Apache license.

RTAI, the "Real Time Application Interface", is now available for the 2.4 kernel series. RTAI is a real-time extension for Linux.

Chinese distributor Bluepoint Linux Software announces its entry into the embedded Linux arena with "Bluepoint Embedded."

e-smith server 4.0 is released. e-smith is a small distribution targeted at server and gateway appliances.

Counterpane Internet Security announces plans to offer a "first-of-its-kind, comprehensive risk management insurance solution". Yet another business model for open source based services, this insurance is offered exclusively to customers of Counterpane, whose network are actively monitored by Counterpane.

Ted Ts'o steps forward to become the new 2.4 status list maintainer. Alan Cox was doing that job until he said that it was time to "find someone else to maintain it". Ted Ts'o responded to Linus' subsequent call for a new status list maintainer.

Preference for DocBook/XML as the canonical format for open source documentation is the major conclusion reached by the attendees at the Open Documentation Summit pre-conference meeting to the Open Source Convention. Participants included representatives from the Linux Documentation Project, GNOME, KDE, FreeBSD, BSDI, SourceForge, Samba, OASIS, Los Alamos National Labs, Python, and Open Content.

The Embedded Linux Consortium announces the election of its first board of directors: Inder Singh, Michael Tiemann, James Ready, Tim Bird, Dan Bandera, and Greg Wright.

Progeny Linux Systems, the startup created by Ian Murdock and Bruce Perens, announces the completion of its first round of financing.

Arne Flones, formerly of Linuxcare, resurfaces over at OpenSales.

Mr. Yongming Wei, founder of the free software project MiniGUI, joins the Bluepoint Beijing Research and Development Center.

LWN attends the Ottawa Linux Symposium. This was a good place to find the Linux development community. With a program dominated by Linux developers, lots of time set aside for people to talk, access to good beer, and no exhibit floor it was truly a hacker's event. Have a look at LWN's OLS coverage for reports and pictures from the event.

The Open Source Printing Summit is hosted by VA Linux Systems (writeup here).

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