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February, 1999

But despite the real and considerable benefits of this development model, open-source software is not likely to upset the balance of power between big players and newer entrants in the software markets. And despite the publicity surrounding a few companies that focus exclusively on open-source software, it will not be the force that drives the next wave of startups to success. Nikki Goth Itoi, Red Herring

Kernel 2.2.1, the "brown paper bag release," is turned loose upon the world.

Wichert Akkerman becomes the leader of the Debian project, replacing Ian Jackson.

Red Hat moves to larger offices and falls off the net for a few days.

Lyx 1.0.0 is released (announcement here).

Which is the biggest Linux user group? The Silicon Valley LUG and the Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group have a "mine is bigger than yours" fight, with inconclusive results.

(Feb 15) Windows refund day happens, but very few people actually get refunds. Nonetheless, awareness of the "Microsoft tax" is raised.

Dell starts selling Linux-installed systems, though they only offer Linux on a couple of server models to start.

Linuxcare rolls out its service offerings, becoming a high-profile Linux company almost overnight.

Security holes in wu-ftpd and proftpd create problems for site administrators.

Linux-Mandrake 5.3 is released; this release is strongly based on Red Hat 5.2, with a bunch of extra goodies added.

KDE 1.1 is released.

Samba 2.0.1 is released, followed quickly by the 2.0.2 "brown paper bag" release.

The Debian 2.1 release is scheduled for March 2.

Let's face it, Windows Refund Day showed not the strengths of Linux, FreeBSD, etc., but their weaknesses. The sparse turnout and pseudo-guerilla theater at the so-called rallies indicated that the open-source-OS market is immature at many levels. Mark Hall, Performance Computing

The international release of SuSE 6.0 is finally made available.

Glibc 2.1 is released, then bounced from the gnu.org site because it does not build properly with gcc 2.8. The increasing gap between the gcc and egcs compiler projects is thus highlighted.

The Burlington Coat Factory announced that it will be installing Linux on over 1100 machines in 250 stores.

IBM announces a partnership with Red Hat to insure that Red Hat's distribution will work properly on IBM systems.

LWN becomes available in Japanese, thanks to the efforts of the folks at ChangeLog.net.

Bruce Perens resigns from the Open Source Initiative following repeated disagreements over what is really free software.

Prosa Debian GNU/Linux is released, featuring a great deal of localization for Italian-speaking users. (Announcement here).

"Uncle George" announce the release of his port of the JAVA JDK 1.2 non-commercial sources for the Alpha architecture. Reports come in of progress on the Blackdown JDK 1.2 port, but no code is yet available for release.

SGI releases the GLX extension code; many other releases are to follow. (GLX here).

January <==

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