See also: last week's Linux History page.

This week in Linux history

Three years ago (October 22, 1998 LWN): Jonathan Postel, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, died from complications from heart surgery.

LinuxWorld went online and LWN contemplated retirement.

So LWN is at a turning point. We could retire, let the trade press take over, and regain a lot of time in our lives. But we don't want to do that. We feel we have something to offer the Linux world. We want to be here next year.

Ironically, LWN is once again questioning its continued existence. (See last week's front page for details.)

Microsoft went on the offensive with an open letter in France:

Linus Torvald [sic] left the university last year to join a Californian company. The development of Linux since slowed down considerably. In the same way, the maintenance of each functionality of Linux depends on the mobilization of the teams. Thus, certain functionalities have not known updating for two years.

In other words, delays in the delivery of new stable kernels are not particularly new... (LWN ran a full English translation of the letter).

Gaël Duval announced plans to form a corporation around Linux-Mandrake. Three years later, MandrakeSoft is doing well.

Two years ago (October 21, 1999 LWN): The first signs came out of the U.S. administration that crypto export laws would be relaxed somewhat. It took another year to see distributions shipping (in the U.S.) with crucial software like ssh.

LWN covered the third Atlanta Linux Showcase. We even had our own Booth Babe.

LinuxToday was acquired by Internet.com and co-founder Dave Whitinger left, to turn up later at Atipa.

One year ago (October 19, 2000 LWN): Red Hat got some grief for releasing development versions of the compiler and C library with Red Hat 7.

In other words, glibc's maintainers haven't expressed confidence that anything newer than 2.1.3 will be stable, and you can't even find anything newer than 2.1.91 on the official glibc website. Yet something newer than both is exactly what's in today's shipping release of Red Hat. -- Evan Leibovitch, ZDNet

Sun released OpenOffice, the open source version of StarOffice. People were not too excited.

Is it just me or does this seem a like putting 450 rugged individualists on a ship and launching them to sea, while we stand on the dock waving our Linux flags -- never expecting to see them again? More casualties of war and adventure. I hope they at least have fun. -- ZDNet

The current development kernel release was 2.4.0-test9, with a test10 prepatch in its fourth revision. People were wondering how to get a faster kernel update cycle. Many ideas were discussed, none were chosen. Kernel releases happen when they are ready, and not before.

Lineo put out a new S-1 filing in an attempt to revive its IPO. They eventually gave up though.

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol.

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

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