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This week in Linux history

It seems this is a traditionally slow week in the Linux community, perhaps due to the U.S. holiday. Of course, the real issue could be that LWN staff, rather than Linux developers, take vacations at this time...

Five years ago Red Hat began the last phase of its experiments with proprietary software when it started shipping ApplixWare for its distribution.

Four years ago Bruce Perens posted the first version of the Debian Social Contract, making the goals of the project explicit. The Debian 1.3.1 minor release was also announced.

Three years ago (July 9, 1998 LWN): Registration for the 2nd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase was announced. This event is alive and well, but this year the event has moved to Oakland, California and is now called the Annual Linux Showcase.

Red Hat announced its Sparc 5.1 release.

Jon "maddog" Hall, employed at Compaq then, was advocating Alpha support within Compaq. Compaq recently announced that it was phasing out Alpha support in favor of Intel's Itanium processor.

The voting for comp.lang.perl.moderated ended with an overwhelming yes vote. Today the site is still alive. It has less flames than comp.lang.perl, but also tends not to get the best material. These days our developement editor monitors websites like Use Perl instead.

Linux was written by the aliens? An alternate version of the origin of Linux was presented in this "X-Files" episode.

Two years ago (July 8, 1999 LWN): The "Packet Storm" security web site was taken offline by Harvard University. Rik van Riel started a movement to find pieces of the site downloaded by various people and pieced the site back together. Harvard did eventually return the data, but the site remained homeless for a while. Packet Storm can now be found at packetstorm.securify.com

Stormix Technologies released the first alpha of Storm Linux.

A company called Hard Data Ltd. contested MontaVista Software's use of the name Hard Hat Linux. Today, MontaVista uses the name Hard Hat Linux. Hard Data Ltd. manufactures built-to-order, high performance Linux and UNIX Workstations, Servers and Beowulf Clusters.

PC World called Linux the 'Most promising software newcomer'.

One year ago (July 6, 2000 LWN): The German Government voiced support for Open Source.

There were three brand new bleeding edge Linux kernel 2.4.0 prepatches out.

Trustix secure Linux 1.1 was released.

AbriaSoft announced Abria MySQL Lite, a commercial packaging of popular open source tools, including Apache, PHP, and the MySQL database.

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol.

July 4, 2001

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

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