LWN: 2000 Linux timeline

May, 2000

The folks at Digital Creations turn up a widespread web security problem in how the web handles authentication. Hostile web pages can be crafted which can cause your browser to take actions under your name on web sites where you have authenticated yourself (LWN coverage here).

The Linux Standard Base (LSB) and Linux Internationalization Initiative (LI18NUX) announce that they have incorporated as the Free Standards Group.

Approximately 140 distribution companies exist across the globe. We believe all but the top five will be bought, will go out of business, or will be relegated to insignificance. Market-share leaders are currently defined around geographic boundaries. Red Hat has the largest global brand recognition and leading North American market share, SuSE leads in Europe, TurboLinux leads in Asia, and Conectiva leads in South America.
-- Keith Bachman, an analyst for W. R. Hambrecht, predicting in The Red Herring
Linuxcare lays off a substantial portion of its workforce - by one report, 80 people, or about 35%. It seems clear, however, that Linuxcare has the dubious honor of being the first open source downsizing.

Linuxcare also officially withdraws its IPO filing (withdrawal letter here).

PHP 4.0 is released. PHP is perhaps the most common Apache add-on, running on millions of web sites.

The Corel/Inprise merger is cancelled. Some would argue that it was never a good deal for Inprise and its shareholders. The recent drop in Corel's stock made the deal even worse for Inprise, and so now the deal has been cancelled.

How many times do users of Windows need to be kicked in the head? It's as if we have a community of people who, upon discovery of 'kick me' signs attached to their backs, do nothing -- and then complain when they eventually do get kicked.
-- Evan Leibovitch writing in ZDNet about the "ILOVEYOU" virus.
The question of "Who do you sue?" when damages are attributable to open source software may be less important after the lessons learned from the "ILOVEYOU" virus/worm. Millions of people were evidently affected, with damages estimated in the billions of dollars. Microsoft's denial of any responsibility puts the lie to the claim that proprietary software comes packaged with somebody to go after for damages.

LinuxMall.com and EBIZ sign a letter of intent to merge.
We believe a royalty-based business model is the Linux model that will have the greatest long term revenue potential, while still respecting and supporting open-source and the rules of GPL.
-- Lineo CEO, Bryan Sparks in this interview on LinuxDevices.com

Lineo files for an IPO. See LWN's analysis of Lineo's IPO filing for more information. (Lineo subsequently does not launch its IPO during 2000.)

Red Hat lays off most of the staff from its Wide Open News site, and ceases doing original writing there.

Red Hat goes into the venture capital business (press release here). "Red Hat Ventures" will make investments of $500,000 to $2 million in new, open source-related companies; the first investments were made in Sendmail, Inc., Rackspace.com, and e-smith.

The point that 2.4 remains a distant goal is reinforced when Alexander Viro posts a list of changes which will go into the 2.3 directory cache with a warning to anybody who maintains a filesystem that is not part of the standard kernel tree: talk to him soon or watch your code break. The need for filesystem changes this deep indicates that 2.4 is still a ways off.

SGI continues its push toward Linux with the announcement of a new line of workstations.

SGI announces the release of its C, C++, and Fortran compilers for the IA-64 architecture under the GPL.

IBM announces that Linux is available for its S/390 mainframe system.

SuSE and Turbolinux both subsequently announce support for the IBM S/390, with a beta version of SuSE due in late June and Turbolinux for the S/390 scheduled for "later this year".

VA Linux Systems announces its revenues for the quarter ending April 28. Its revenue was $34.6 million for the quarter with just over 4%, or $1.5 million, in services-related revenue.

VA Linux Systems acquires Precision Insight. PI works with XFree86, providing support services, developing video drivers, and so on.

Caldera Systems reports results for the quarter ending April 30, the first such announcement since the company went public. It brought in $1.4 million - up from $544,000 a year ago with losses during the quarter of $9.2 million.

Nessus 1.0, a free, open-sourced (GPL-ed), and frequently updated security scanner, is released. "Nessus performs as many security checks as you could expect from a commercial security scanner (over 400) and is very up-to-date regarding this issue. It also has its own unique features, such as services recognition (so that a web server running on port 8080 will _also_ be tested), its own scripting language, and many more.".

The first stable release of the nmap security scanner in slightly over a year is available (nmap 2.50) and contains many new features.

PostgreSQL 7.0 is released with a large list of new features (announcement here).

PostgreSQL is also the primary focus of a new company, Great Bridge. This new subsidiary of Landmark Communications "is trying to integrate smoothly with the open-source community responsible for the development of PostgreSQL "

The initial release of Red Escolar Linux is announced. Red Escolar Linux is the Linux distribution being developed and supported by the Red Escolar Project, which will be deploying the distribution throughout schools in Mexico.

The first public BitKeeper source management system release is available. BitKeeper promises some good things for software management. It's not 100% "open source" software, however; see this 1999 LWN feature on for details on its licensing.

The first Orbiten Free Software Survey is out. They looked at some 25 million lines of free software code, trying to get a feel for what its developer community looks like. They turned up some 12,000 developers working on more then 3,000 projects.

DocBook V4.0 and DocBook XML 4.0 are released. "DocBook is an SGML DTD maintained by the DocBook Technical Committee of OASIS. It is particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to these applications)."

Motif becomes almost open source when the Open Group announces that the Motif toolkit, long the standard X toolkit on commercial Unix systems, has been released under a "public license." This license is GPLish but the Open Group recognizes that its license is not "open source," and deals with the issue explicitly in the Open Motif FAQ.

Eric Raymond first releases CML2, his new implementation of a kernel configuration system, CML2, written in Python.

resize2fs, a utility to resize ext2 filesystems written by Ted Ts'o is released under the GPL. The utility was announced back in May, 1998 as software done under contract to PowerQuest that, after a period of time, would cease being proprietary software.

The Software Carpentry contest announces its finalists that will go to the last round of judging. The contest is trying to spur the development of replacements for some well-known development tools; the entries at this point consist of proposals for new tools. There is no code available - yet.

Attrition.org makes available charts showing moving 29-day averages of the number of reported web-site defacements, sorted by operating system. Add this to your statistical fodder, for comparing the security of various operating systems.

The Embedded Debian Project is announced. As the name suggests, this project seeks to help get the Debian distribution into embedded applications.

ActiveState will donate its Python and Perl work to the Mozilla project under the terms of a deal signed between Netscape and ActiveState this May. ActiveState gets Javascript and they have agreed to cooperate on some development projects. ActiveState has also chosen Mozilla as a cross platform development framework for Komodo, its Perl and Python integrated development environment (IDE).

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is jointly proposed to the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) by UserLand Software, Ariba, Commerce One, Compaq Computer Corporation, Developmentor, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM, IONA Technologies, Lotus Development Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, and SAP AG.

TimeSys Corporation announces the release of TimeSys Linux/RT 1.0, its real-time Linux distribution.

Andover.Net announces a new print magazine called "Open", which will launch in August. It offers trade-rag style free subscriptions.

The Linux Journal announces the launch of the LinuxBazaar.com Linux-related hardware and software e-commerce site.

Jason Haas recovers from his car accident and returns to work at LinuxPPC.

MontaVista hires Gregory Haerr, the leader of the open source Microwindows project, as "Chief Strategist".

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