LWN: 2000 Linux timeline

November, 2000

In my ideal world, the single resulting project would include both the historical StarOffice team and the historical AbiWord team, and the best code from all of StarOffice and AbiWord and Gnumeric and Guppi and so on. The only reason that won't happen is ego or lack of trying. So, I'm asking both teams to please try; and to think about the end goal of delivering a full-featured office suite to end users as soon as possible, putting ego aside.
-- The GNOME project grapples with office suite decisions

Richard Stallman declares his support for FreeDevelopers.net, a widespread group trying to create a truly democratic, open source company. Beginnings are difficult, however, and the company remains unable even to afford its own mailing list server.

GreatBridge.org launches as a developer support site for the PostgreSQL relational database.

SuSE releases SuSE Linux S/390, the first commercial distribution for the IBM mainframe system (announcement here).

VA Linux Systems warns that revenue will be below expectations, with the result that its stock gets pounded down to a fraction of its IPO price.

The KDE League comes into existence at the Comdex Linux Business Expo (announcement here). The League will handle the KDE project's public relations while staying, they promise, entirely out of the development side of things.

The first GNOME Foundation election completes; the winners are Miguel de Icaza, Havoc Pennington, Owen Taylor, Jim Gettys, Federico Mena Quintero, Bart Decrem, Daniel Veillard, Dan Mueth, Maciej Stachowiak, John Heard, and Raph Levien.

The fact that the company has been able to steer itself without a media- and industry-friendly figurehead only begs the question, though. If Tyde and other managers were competent enough to keep the company afloat during its most desperate period, couldn't Linuxcare have saved itself a whole lot of misery -- and money -- by keeping him in on as CEO 16 months ago?
-- Upside questions the IPO game.
Digital Creations receives $12 million in venture financing (announcement here). See also LWN's conversation with CEO Paul Everitt on this investment.

Randy Dunlap steps down as the Linux USB maintainer after almost a year in that position. He was the first to take responsibility for the USB subsystem, and, under his supervision, it grew into a highly functional, stable piece of code. Randy's replacement is Johannes Erdfelt.

Debian 2.2r1 is released (announcement here). Debian also announces that over 100 new maintainers have been admitted to the project since the process was restarted.

Netscape 6 is released; it's the first version of the browser to contain code from the Mozilla project.

Turbolinux does not endorse breaking passwords on Microsoft software or any other products.
-- Turbolinux announces that it has been breaking Microsoft passwords.
The Polish government taxes a company for its free software use, saying that Linux must be accounted for as a donation.

Jay Beale is hired by MandrakeSoft as the director of its security group (announcement here).

Red Hat finally gets a new CFO; it's Kevin Thompson, who had joined the month before as the vice president of operations.

The Linux Business Expo happens in Las Vegas as part of Comdex. See LWN's coverage of the event.

Corel considers selling its Linux operation according to many persistent rumors.

Celeste Amanda Torvalds is born on November 20.

This time significant names such as IBM, Compaq, TurboLinux, HP and Borland are trying to play Switzerland by putting their names behind both the GNOME and KDE efforts. Such a play makes no sense; each camp seeks to make its project the definitive Linux desktop, and an organisation that supports both would-be standards appears more ignorant than one that stays out of the fray. This divided support is akin to sending arms to both sides of a war; it may be a neutral action, but it intensifies the confrontation and makes coexistence that much harder to achieve.
-- ZDNet doesn't believe in supporting both camps
EBIZ acquires Jones Business Systems, a "white box" Unix systems vendor. The resulting company, it is said, will have $50 million in annual revenue.

No FrameMaker on Linux. Adobe sends out a note saying that the beta of FrameMaker for Linux will be pulled and that no Linux product is forthcoming.

No Red Hat on Sparc. Red Hat confirms, finally, that Red Hat 7 will not be released for the Sparc architecture. Support for the Sparc remains in the "Rawhide" development distribution.

Red Hat 7 on the Alpha is released, followed by a flurry of updates.

SuSE Linux 7.0 for the Alpha is released (announcement here).

The Debian Project joins the GNOME Foundation board (announcement here).

HarperBusiness will publish a book by Linus Torvalds called "Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary." It will be co-written with David Diamond. (Announcement here).

Interwoven releases TclPro as open source, an action the Tcl community had been hoping for since the company acquired Ajuba Solutions and discontinued the product in October.

The European Patent Convention votes against legitimizing software patents - for now.

Trustix Secure Linux 1.2 is released (announcement here).

October <== Timeline Home ==> December