Timeline Home

==> February

January, 1999

"Prediction No. 4: Linux will become just another Unix. The Internet lost its charm when big business discovered it. The same will happen with Linux. Linux will wipe out SCO and Unixware and gain ground against NT, but will lose its soul in the process." -- Bob Lewis, InfoWorld.

Once widely denigrated by commercial developers as chaotic programming by committee, open source is now expected to come into its own this year as a business model, with potentially far-reaching consequences for developers and consumers of computer software. -- Amy Harmon, New York Times

Linus Torvalds complains that he is not getting patches for the ISDN subsystem, and threatens to put out 2.2 without them.

(January 9) Creative Labs says there will be no SB Live driver for Linux. From their note: "Creative has no plans of releasing its intellectual property to the general public."

The Linux Kernel Archive Mirror System goes live eliminating all problems in getting kernel sources. The quality of this mirror system remains unmatched - it just works.

Joey Hess inaugurates the Debian Weekly News. The first issue breaks the news that Richard Stallman uses Debian, and talks about Debian at trade shows.

The Artist's Guide to the Gimp by Michael Hammel is published by SSC.

(January 12) Creative Labs advertises for a Linux driver writer to produce an SB Live driver (job posting here).

Kernel Traffic launches, carrying detailed summaries of linux-kernel discussions. The first issue looked at vfork, the "C++ in the kernel" discussion, and more.

Tucows launches LinuxBerg, its Linux software download site.

Samba 2.0 is released. It contains a reverse-engineered implementation of the Microsoft domain controller protocols, allowing Linux servers to provide complete services to Windows networks.

Corel sells its NetWinder division to Hardware Computing Canada.

Debian 2.1 ("slink") goes into "deep freeze."

Slackware finally gets a web site with the launch of www.slackware.com.

LWN completes its first year of publication.

Microsoft Corp. will shout it out to the world when Windows 2000 finally ships. Linux creator Linus Torvald [sic] announced the arrival of the next generation of Linux, version 2.2, with a simple note to the Linux-kernel mailing list. -- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Sm@rt Reseller.

(January 25) Kernel 2.2.0 is released after more than two years of development.

Hewlett Packard and Compaq announce plans to offer Linux-based systems. SGI contents itself with providing information on how to bring up Linux on its systems.

The TCP Wrapper code is replaced by a version with a back door, showing that evil stuff can be concealed in open source code too - at least for a while. The modified version remains available for less than ten hours, and no sites are compromised as a result. (Details here).

Linus announces that 2.2.1 will not be released for several weeks. The world responds by turning up an ugly "crash the system" bug in 2.2.0, necessitating a quick 2.2.1 release.

The Harmony Project, which sought to create a LGPL clone of the Qt library, is officially declared dead.

Loki Entertainment Software announces that it will port "Civilization: Call To Power" to Linux.

Guido van Rossum and others sent out their Computer Programming for Everybody into DARPA.

Transvirtual's open source JVM, Kaffe, attracts attention over at Salon.com.

A month after Sun announced the release of the JDK 1.2, Blackdown's JDK 1.2 is reported to be running on Intel and PowerPC platforms.

Timeline Home

==> February