See also: last week's Linux History page.

This week in Linux history

Three years ago (October 29, 1998 LWN): The Red Escolar (Scholar Net) project was announced. This was a plan to install Linux throughout 140,000 schools in Mexico and was led by Arturo Espinosa. Nowadays, after gaining experience improving Gnome for the Red Escolar project, Arturo continued his work on Gnome in the United States, working for Helix Code (now Ximian). The Red Escolar project has been bogged down in politics and is suffering from a lack of funds and a lack of knowledgeable people.

There was a development kernel release 2.1.126. However the release had a number of compilation and lockup problems, so most avoided it and waited for 2.1.127.

Debian got congratulations on their port of Debian to the Netwinder two years ago. The Netwinder, however, has remained an infrequently used device, not quite living up to the promise we thought it had back then.

Corel announced its support for the Wine project, choosing it as a platform to bring their products to Linux and promising an infusion of new developers to the project as well. Although Corel has since gone over to the dark side, Wine is flourishing. The latest release is dated October 4, 2001.

Opera Software was having trouble creating a Linux version of its browser using volunteer developers for a proprietary project.

"If they wanted to tap into all that enthusiasm, opening up the source is the only way I know how to do that," said Eric Raymond, whose pioneering work in open-source development helped spur Netscape into freeing the source code of its Communicator browser. -- Wired News

Fortunately Opera has since resolved those problems and Opera for Linux is now available.

Two years ago (October 28, 1999 LWN): To no one's surprise, licensing problems between Qt and the GPL were in the spotlight two years ago, with Corel's development as the catalyst. Corel liked using Qt for developing the software they added to the Corel Linux distribution, but their developers were much less likely to be aware of potential licensing conflicts when mixing the Qt with GPL'ed code from Debian. Of course, such problems have now been largely eliminated by the dual-licensing of Qt under the GPL, a possibility not even under discussion then.

Comdex has had a standing policy of not admitting any person under the age of eighteen to the exhibit floor. That policy came under scrutiny, spawning much debate.

"There are some realities in this marketplace that Comdex is ignoring," said Lavers, a long-time Microsoft contractor who recently signed on as an equal partner at Matrixcubed, which son Mike launched at age 14 (a programmer at 3, he already had 11 years experience, explains Lavers the elder).

"Today's Internet marketplace includes active participation, contributions, and leadership from younger and younger people." -- Wired News

This year's Comdex registration page says "Note: No one under 16 is admitted." Other computer conferences have successfully removed such age restrictions, and events such as this do have much to offer interested teens, but Comdex seems to be moving in the wrong direction.

Miguel de Icaza quit his job in Mexico and moved to the United States, to build the company called Helix Code, with Nat Friedman and "secret investors". Today Ximian (the renamed Helix Code) is doing well producing GNOME and other applications.

One year ago (October 26, 2000 LWN): Ajuba Solutions was acquired by Interwoven. Ajuba was the corporate champion of the scripting language Tcl/Tk, and put in a large part of the total development effort. Some Ajuba (Tcl/Tk) developers stayed at Ajuba, doing proprietary XML stuff for Interwoven, who had no interest in Tcl/Tk and no plans to support it. ActiveState has taken over Tcl/Tk sponsorship. Then as now, Dr. Dobb's Journal is sponsoring the "Tcl-URL!" project.

KDE 2.0 was released.

Cliff and Iris Miller, the founders of TurboLinux, left that company and started Mountain View Data, where they remain.

LynuxWorks filed for an IPO. They are still a privately held company however.

A new site called KernelTrap showed up on the Web. It remains a good source of information about (Linux) kernel hacking.

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol.

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

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