See also: last week's Linux History page.

This week in Linux history

On the news end, Bill Gates claimed, "I've never had a customer mention Linux to me". He probably wishes he could still say that.

Caldera made its Netware server available on OpenLinux.

This nifty little Software Wars map was a link of the week. It has been recently updated, and merits another look.

Two years ago (July 1, 1999 LWN): Eric Raymond released The Magic Cauldron. A Linux-powered telephone was announced. The Mindcraft benchmarks were re-run, this time with Linux performing much better (but still losing).

Hard Hat Linux was first announced. So was KRUD (Kevin's Red Hat Uber Distribution).

The Apache Software Foundation was formed to provide organizational, legal and financial support for Apache.

Slashdot was acquired by Andover.net. News.com talked with Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda.

Linux has conquered the server market, and desktop computers are next, he said. "That's become pretty apparent," he said, although many in the computing world would disagree.

In the longer term, the open-source movement will expand from operating systems to another Microsoft stronghold, desktop applications, he predicted.

Close, but not quite. The desktop was not next. Linux moved down into embedded devices and branched out into high-availability super-computing before conquering the desktop.

MandrakeSoft made its "Cooker" development distribution available to brave souls worldwide.

Linux-related IPO's were the subject of this USA Today article, but the focus shifted at the end, to a view of Linux from the Microsoft perspective. MS was embroiled in anti-trust trials and citing Linux as evidence that there was no monopoly. MS had also just invited Eric S. Raymond to speak to a group of engineers at the Redmond complex.

Microsoft also has an unspecified number of engineers studying Linux. On Monday, one of the leading Linux proponents met with about 100 Microsoft employees.

"Our job is to understand our competitors and do a good job meeting the demands of our customers," says Microsoft's Ed Muth, a group product manager in the division developing the next version of Windows for corporate computers. However, Muth says Linux is more of a competitor to the various versions of UNIX, not Windows.

Of course, we don't hear much from Ed Muth anymore...

One year ago (June 29, 2000 LWN): MySQL was re-licensed under the GPL, becoming free software at last.

The development kernel release, 2.4.0-test2 was announced by Linus.

Normally, when you integrate almost 5MB of patches, bad things happen. This time, a miracle occurred. As I uploaded the resultant kernel, a specter of the holy penguin appeared before me, and said "It is Good. It is Bugfree".

In spite of the assurances by the holy penguin, the patch was somewhat less than perfect, and the first prepatch for test3 was out in short order.

Only Two Linux Companies Really Matter said Joseph C. Panettieri, in this ZDNet article.

Like it or not, major hardware vendors and corporate America don't want to support five or more flavors of Linux. It's just too darned expensive and troublesome to deal with multiple operating-system vendors.

What seems to be increasingly common is to see hardware vendors pick specific distributions for specific products. IBM ThinkPads come with Caldera, while SuSE is common choice for IBM mainframes. Hardware vendors don't have to support all the Linux distributions, just a small subset with the qualities they feel will best complement their product. That's one of the reasons that the total number of Linux distributions continues to grow.

Slackware 7.1 was released.

Mission Critical Linux, Inc. released the source code for its high-availability Kimberlite cluster technology under the GPL.

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

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