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August, 1999

Eric Raymond releases a new version of The Cathedral and the Bazaar (read it here), and announces that O'Reilly will be packaging up his papers into a book aimed at business readers.

We coders had been abruptly disenfranchised, after having had silver carrots waved in front of our noses. I'd opened my first money-market account just now, in order to take part in the commercial future of something I believed in -- and the door had been slammed in my face. C. Scott Ananian has trouble with the Red Hat offering, Salon

Linus calls for a 2.3 feature freeze in two weeks in this note. It ends up taking rather longer than that...

MandrakeSoft hires KDE hacker David Faure to work on Koffice (announcement here).

Red Hat issues a set of GNOME updates. At this point, more than 30% of the original 6.0 release has been replaced with updates.

...the open-source movement will implode as its community-based approach is crushed under the weight of the movement's popularity. Egos will weigh in and the result will be splintering into multiple factions, which will greatly reduce the movement's effectiveness. -- Bob O'Donnell, InfoWorld.

The second LinuxWorld Conference and Expo is held in San Jose (LWN coverage here).

Red Hat's Initial Public Offering happens despite a market that is hostile to IPOs. A last-minute repricing helps to create difficulties for people participating in the community offering. The stock price immediately rises to $50; a value that seems high at the time.

IBM joins the Trillian project, which is porting Linux to the IA-64 ("Merced", "Itanium") processor.

Microsoft puts a Windows 2000 system on the net as a security challenge, it goes down several times in the first day. LinuxPPC has better luck with a similar challenge.

Stable kernel 2.2.11 is released, and Linus hands off the 2.2 kernel entirely to Alan Cox.

Linus complains that he is not getting ISDN patches, and that the 2.4 kernel may go out with an old ISDN implementation.

For the umpteenth time, someone paved paradise, put up a parking lot. For the thousands of Linux coders who've build the utopian open-source movement - offering free help to create a free operating system - the IPO of Red Hat Software was a sure sign of Wall Street cutting the ribbon on the new Linux mall. -- The Industry Standard

November 1 will be the freeze date for the Debian potato release according to this announcement.

Definite Linux 6.1 is released.

Motorola jumps into Linux announcements of embedded systems products, support and training services, and a partnership with Lineo.

The LWN Linux Stocks Page is launched to track the increasing number of publicly-traded Linux companies.

The Red Hat Wealth Monitor is also launched.

Freshmeat.net is acquired by Andover.net; it joins Slashdot in Andover's growing stable of Linux sites.

RAID 0.90 is included in the 2.2.12 prepatches, then removed after concerns about the need to upgrade utilities and some residual problems.

Support for 4GB of memory on 32-bit Intel systems is released by Andrea Arcangeli and Gerhard Wichert.

Atipa Linux Solutions builds a 200-node Beowulf cluster for Motorola (press release here). It is to be used for semiconductor modeling and development.

Debian developer Joey Hess calls for an interim Debian release while Potato is being finalized; his proposal eventually goes down among fears that such a release would distract effort from getting Potato done.

A 1000-node Beowulf system for genetic programming is announced by Genetic Programming, Inc.

Corel and Rebel.com donate a pile of NetWinder systems to the United Nations Development Program.

The AXA Innovation Fund makes an equity investment in MandrakeSoft (Announcement here). MandrakeSoft makes other announcements, including the creation of its "Cooker" development release, U.S. support offerings via Bynari Systems, and more. (More in LWN's interview of Gäel Duval).

Shares of Red Hat, which is betting it can popularize a free computer operating system that competes with Microsoft's Windows, could tumble in the next few months as the novelty of the first public Linux company wears off, analysts said. -- News.com, August 22, 1999, when Red Hat cost $68/share.

Red Hat and Caldera Systems both announce year-2000 compliance for their distributions.

SGI contributes spinlock metering code to the Linux kernel.

After decades as vaporware, Ted Nelson's Xanadu is released to the world as open source. (Web page here).

Midgard 1.2 is released (announcement here).

The sourceXchange posts its first six RFP's, all of which come from Hewlett-Packard.

Red Hat severs its relationship with the Itsutsubashi Research Company in Japan, announcing that it will instead develop its own Japanese distribution. Itsutsubashi goes on to form the LASER5 distribution, which will compete with Red Hat.

The O'Reilly Open Source Convention is held in Monterey, CA (web page here).

A new set of FTP security vulnerabilities causes problems on the net.

Sun acquires StarDivision; it announces plans to release StarOffice under the Sun Community Source License and to make a web-enabled version of the office suite.

A second pre-release of the Blackdown teams' port of the JDK 1.2 from Sun is made available.

Cryptix, a clean-room implementation of Sun's Java Cryptography Extentions (JCD) is released.

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