See also: last week's Linux History page.

This week in Linux history

The Mozilla source was released, as covered on this week's front page.

As a direct result of Netscape's release of the Mozilla source code, a grassroots coalition was formed in Australia to create a cross-platform Web browser by adding the full-strength cryptography provided by SSLeay.

Inter@ctive Week ran 25 unsung heroes of the net. Tim O'Reilly was number 19 and Linus is number 23 on the list. Neither is quite so unsung anymore.

TechWeb News covered Corel's plans for a Linux-based network computer. "Corel could begin seeing revenue from its forthcoming network computer as soon as its next fiscal quarter, said CEO Michael Cowpland on Thursday."

Linus declared a feature freeze for 2.2 kernel release - which turned out to be almost a year away still.

Orders were being taken for S.u.S.E. 5.2.

Kevin Forge on the seul-dev-apps group mentioned the project underway to create a free QT Widgetset. The Harmony project planned to cover the subset of QT used by KDE, hopefully stopping the "Troll" wars. Harmony never did reach completion, of course, but it was part of the environment that brought an end to that conflict anyway.

Michael Hammel announced his site graphics-muse.org, dedicated to graphics tools for Linux. We wrote: If you do anything with graphics, you will probably learn something from a visit with the Muse. That is still true even though we keep him pretty busy on LWN.

Two years ago (April 1, 1999 LWN): Eric Raymond threatened to quit after being flamed a few too many times. As a follow-up to his memo, called "Take My Job, Please!", he wrote Understand My Job, Please! Eric has, in fact, remained on the job.

Neal Stephenson wrote a lengthy piece about free software, entitled In the Beginning was the Command Line.

The current kernel release was 2.2.5. In the announcement for the release, Linus stated his intention to take a two-week vacation.

The official Dutch KDE website was announced by the Dutch Documentation Team. The address for the site is http://www.kde.nl.

VA Research announced it was outsourcing most of its manufacturing, due to the fact that it could not keep up with the demand for their systems. C|Net's News.com covered the news.

VA has benefited from this boom, quadrupling its staff in the last four months to more than 60. The Mountain View, California, company also is in the process of moving to new headquarters with four times the floor space. The last stage of the move, transferring the computer assembly operation, is scheduled for completion April 17.

VA Research, of course, later changed its name to VA Linux Systems.

Bill Gates came out with a new book that was reviewed by Salon:

The one person at Microsoft who doesn't seem to have received the bad news is Gates himself. Last week, he dismissed Linux with these words: ''There has certainly been a lot of free software out there for the last 20 years. The main thing that has held that back is that because it's free software there's no central point of control. So what you see with Linux, and other things, is you get proliferations of different versions and everybody can go into the source code, and everybody does.''

Some things never change.

One year ago (March 30, 2000 LWN): LWN announced its acquisition by Tucows.com. We closed April 4, 2000. It's been a great year for us and, we hope, for you too.

The UCITA ("shrink-wrap software") bill passed in Virginia, and was headed toward Maryland. Fortunately, it appears to have slowed down considerably since then.

LWN was also getting ready for the Colorado Linux Info Quest (CLIQ) on April 1. LWN team members Jonathan Corbet, Rebecca Sobol, Dennis Tenney and Forrest Cook shared booth duty. Liz Coolbaugh ran the talks and BOFs. Michael Hammel managed CLIQ 2000. Of course he wasn't a LWN senior editor yet. CLIQ 2001 is on March 30.

The current development kernel release was 2.3.99-pre3. Jay Fenlason posted a note to Bugtraq covering a local denial-of-service attack that impacted both the 2.2.14 and the 2.3.99-pre2 kernels. Alexey Kuznetsov responded with a patch for 2.3 for the problem.

The Timpanogas Research Group announced the release of its NWFS 2.2 NetWare file system under the GPL.

Russian software distributor CPS announced a Corel Linux Download special edition and Corel Linux received this glowing review on Technofile.

We reported that LinuxPPC developer Jason Haas was in a serious car accident. He was released from the hospital on May 1 and by early August was able to spend a few hours every day on the computer.

Red Hat 6.2 was officially released. Also Red Hat reported its fourth quarter results. Last year it reported revenue of $13.1 million, this year the company reported fourth quarter revenue of $27 million. Red Hat does continue moving toward profitably.

Linuxcare was reviewing an application a week. The application for that week was the Gnumeric spreadsheet. "This application looks sharp and functions pretty well for my current needs. Given the momentum behind the GNOME project, Gnumeric is on its way to becoming a convincing alternative to similar proprietary applications."

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