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December, 1999

The ALSA Professional Team is formed, this team, funded by SuSE, will work full-time at developing the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. (Announcement here).

Andover.net goes public at $18/share, closes over $60. The result is seen as a victory for both Andover and the OpenIPO process.

Gee. Remember when the big question was "How do we make money at this?" -- Eric Raymond

VA Linux Systems goes public the following day after two repricings. The final IPO price is $30/share; that price rises immediately to $300, before closing around $250. It sets the record for the biggest IPO rise in the history of the NASDAQ.

Linux fever strikes many other stocks, including some that are peripherally related to Linux, if at all.

Our mission, our evangelism to the open source community, is that money is good. The fact that open source can move forward without money being involved is great, but money can make it better. -- CoSource.com CEO Bernie Thompson, in Upside.

Linux kernel 2.3.30 is released, it includes initial support for NUMA systems. Non-Uniform Memory Access is an important technique used in large-scale multiprocessor systems. (LWN coverage here).

Sun releases a Java 2 implementation for Linux. In the process, Sun neglects to credit the Blackdown Team for doing much of the work, creating a number of unhappy people. (Sun announcement here, and LWN coverage here).

SuSE 6.3 starts shipping.

Zope 2.1.1 is released (announcement here).

Dell announces that it will offer Linux on its entire PowerEdge server line. Dell's systems will also ship with 90 days of Red Hat support.

The O'Reilly Network launches, though the truly big launch is to happen in January. (Announcement here).

Matra Datavision releases CASCADE under an open-source license. CASCADE is a massive library for geometric modeling and related tasks; Matra Datavision claims to have spent $75 million in its development. The license used is much like the GPL.

The Bazaar is held in New York City, attendance is light.

Miguel de Icaza wins the FSF Free Software Award for his work on GNOME.

Bastille Linux 1.0.0 is released; Bastille Linux is a project to make a highly secure distribution.

Development kernel 2.3.33 is released, and includes a warning that the 2.4 code freeze is coming.

The Kernel Journal is launched by Zack Brown, aims to be the definitive source for infomation on kernel patches. (Journal here).

Red Hat acquires German distributor Delix, the DLD distribution is to be "rolled into" Red Hat.

Debian 2.1r4 is released, fixing a number of security and year 2000 problems. (Announcement here).

Linux-Mandrake 6.1 is certified as year-2000 compliant. (Announcement here).

Storm Linux 2000 is released (announcement here).

KRASH (the unstable preview of KDE 2.0) is released (announcement here).

Zope and Mozilla announce a partnership which involves joint development in a number of areas. (Announcement here).

The first beta version of e-speak is released by HP E-speak is HP's answer to providing network services in the future - it is strongly oriented toward allowing services to be found, integrated, and accessed without the need to nail down protocols in advance. (Announcement here).

Xybernaut launches a wearable Linux system (announcement here).

Could there be any better demonstration of how passion can affect the economy? These stock market valuations are fueled in part by the belief of thousands of small investors that Linux is well on its way to world domination. Their willingness to pony up their cash is making that belief come true, provided Red Hat and VA Linux use their market clout wisely. -- Janelle Brown et al, Salon

Linuxcare acquires the Puffin Group, Prosa, and Cheek Consulting. They also obtain $32.5 million in venture capital.

Caldera, Red Hat, SuSE, and TurboLinux join the Trillian Project.

Bruce Perens becomes CEO of the Linux Capital Group, a venture capital company oriented toward startup Linux companies.

Applix acquires CoSource.com less than a week after its launch. (Announcement here).

The Brazilian legislature proposes a law to require the use of open source software in government.

Red Hat announces a stock split.

Eric Raymond starts on "The Art of Unix Programming." It's a book about what makes the Unix world unique; he seeks to write it with a lot of help from the net (web page here).

Sun pulls back from working with the standards process for Java with the European Computer Manufacturers' Association (ECMA), withholding key documents.

Sun again pre-announces the coming of the Java 2 platform for Linux, this time unveiling cooperative work with Inprise to produce a JDK 1.2.2. The press release triggers concern and upset with the Blackdown team, resulting in the departure of at least one team member (see LWN Coverage December 9th and December 16th).

Simultaneously, the Blackdown team announced another pre-release , JDK 1.2.2 RC3, considered a candidate for the first stable release of a JDK 1.2.X on Linux, almost exactly one year after Sun's JDK 1.2 started shipping.

Gimp 1.1 goes into final beta testing; the 1.2 stable release is expected shortly after the beginning of the year. (New feature list here).

Mozilla M12 is released, Mozilla reaches that "almost ready for alpha" stage.

Linux-Mandrake 7.0 is released in beta form. Among other things, includes a user-configurable security level.

GNUPC.com launches; they bring a twist to the Linux box business by shipping systems with no operating system installed; instead seven distributions are packed with the box. (Web site here).

Richard Stallman calls for a boycott of Amazon.com, following Amazon's use of software patents against a competitor. (Boycott call here).

The Real-Time Linux workshop is held in Vienna. (Report here).

The "DVD Copy Control Association" files suit against 72 defendants, all of whom had something to do with the reverse engineering of the DVD encryption scheme or committed some other offense, such as linking to information on the DVD crack. The initial attempt to get a restraining order against those posting or linking to the DeCSS code was denied by the courts.

The 1999 Debian GNU/Linux timeline is posted (timeline here).

id Software open sources Quake 1.

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