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April, 1999

Netscape celebrates the first anniversary of the Mozilla release. Netscape's press release celebrates the anniversary: "In a year's time, mozilla.org has gone from being a beautiful idea to a beautiful reality."

Jamie Zawinski quits the Mozilla project; his resignation letter paints it as a failure. "And here we are, a year later. And we haven't even shipped a beta yet." In general, the perceived failure of Mozilla brings a period of questioning. In the end, Mozilla and free software both go on.

Dell invests in Red Hat, and also start shipping server systems with Red Hat Linux preinstalled.

Dell also claims to be the first vendor offering web-based sales of Linux systems. A number of Linux systems vendors wondered what they had been doing all that time; Penguin Computing issued a press release contesting the claim.

Systems shipped by Dell also include 90 days of support from LinuxCare.

Al Gore's presidential campaign web site claims to be Open Source. That claim is gone, but the site still claims: "In the spirit of the Open Source movement, we have established the Gore 2000 Volunteer Source Code Project. www.algore2000.com is an 'open site'".

Today I received the following threat in e-mail from Eric Raymond. The message was copied to the Silicon Valley Linux User's Group officers, who you may consult regarding its authenticity. The police have been notified. Because I know that Eric is a firearms enthusiast, for my own protection, I feel the best strategy is for me to publicize the threat widely. The Bruce and Eric game turns ugly

TheLinuxStore.com opens up, starts selling Linux systems at rock-bottom prices.

The Mindcraft study is released and immediately becomes the target of intense criticism. The study is funded by Microsoft, done in a Microsoft lab, and features a highly-tuned NT server against a completely untuned Linux system. The study is rightly trashed, but it also points out some performance problems in the Linux kernel. Kernel hackers respond by fixing the problems.

...please imagine what it is like to see an idealistic project stymied and made ineffective, because people don't usually give it the credit for what it has done. If you're an idealist like me, that can ruin your whole decade. -- Richard Stallman on GNU/Linux

Version 1.0 of FreeS/Wan is released.

Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 is released. This release makes Caldera the first vendor out with a release based on the 2.2 kernel, includes an installer that raises the bar for all distributors, and includes a version number jump (the previous was 1.3).

Corel announces that its Linux distribution will be based on Debian and KDE. The announcement gets a lot of attention, and raises somewhat the profile of the Debian Project. (Announcement here).

Linus Torvalds speaks at Comdex/Spring.

SuSE 6.1 is released.

LinuxNewbie.org hits the net (site here), and tries to make life easier for Linux beginners everywhere.

The egcs steering committee becomes the official maintainer for gcc, thus ending one of the more unpleasant free software forks in recent times.

Python 1.5.2 is released.

KDE 1.1.1 beta is released

HP announces 24x7 support services for the Caldera, TurboLinux, Red Hat and SuSE distributions. They also release OpenMail for Linux.

"Where do you want to go tomorrow?" disappears from linux.de after threats from "a large company."

VA Research acquires Linux Hardware Solutions.

Red Hat 6.0 is released. It includes nice things like the 2.2 kernel, but looks a little lackluster compared to OpenLinux 2.2.

UltraPenguin goes away. The UltraSparc distribution sees the end of its life - everything of interest from this distribution had been folded into Red Hat 6.0.

Cygnus announced an open source Java compiler. It is rumored that IBM's just-ported-to-Win32 JVM will also be made available for Linux.

Linux finishes first in the International Operating System Counter survey; it runs on 31.3% of the 1.4 million hosts surveyed. (IOSC here).

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