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May, 1999

Guido van Rossum and Donald Becker win the "excellence in programming" award given by Dr. Dobb's Journal.

wu-ftpd exploits create security problems across the net, more fixes are distributed.

Creative Technologies releases a beta SB Live driver. The driver proves problematic, but, due to its closed-source nature, can not be fixed.

Linus writes a new Universal Serial Bus (USB) driver and tosses it into the 2.2.7 kernel. This move comes as a bit of a surprise to the developers of the UUSBD project, who had been working on USB for some time. Progress on USB support does speed up after the change, however.

I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run... My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. -- Ken Thompson doesn't like Linux

Definite Linux 6.0 is released.

Tcl 8.1 is released.

KDE 1.1.1 is released (announcement here).

Rebel.com is the new name for Hardware Computing Canada, the firm that bought Corel's Netwinder division.

Linux Expo is held in Raleigh, NC. This is perhaps the last time this conference is held in this form. (LWN coverage here).

Those two little words - open source - have become a magical incantation, like portal in 1998 or push in 1997. Just whisper them and all will be yours: media attention, consumer interest, and, of course, venture capital. -- Andrew Leonard, Wired

Restrictions on the export of cryptographic code violate the first amendment of the US Constitution according to this ruling by the Ninth circuit court.

Kernel 2.2.8 comes out, and, simultaneously, 2.3.0, beginning the new development series. (announcement here).

Japanese Debian 2.1 is released by the Debian JP Project. Over 200 new packages provide Japanese support for the distribution. (Announcement here).

TurboLinux announces a high-availability Linux cluster offering. Some grumbling is heard about their treatment of the Linux-HA project and proprietary code.

Sun Microsystems announces a utility to run Linux binaries on Solaris x86.

LinuxHQ is yanked away from Jim Pick, who has operated it for years. The site is eventually sold to Linux.org. The site formerly known as LinuxHQ returns as kernelnotes.org and continues business as usual.

Two "open source exchange" sites - the sourceXchange and Cosource.com - pop up in the same week. Both intend to connect paying open source projects with interested developers, though they take different approaches. (LWN coverage on May 20 and December 9).

O'Reilly posts "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" on the web as open source in its own right. This book includes chapters from Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Michael Tiemann, Larry Wall, Bruce Perens, and many more.

Linus Torvalds is awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of Mathematics and Science, Stockholm University.

Linux.com goes live as the latest in Linux portal sites.

Pacific HiTech renames itself to TurboLinux.

VA Research renames itself to VA Linux Systems.

SGI announces that it will port its XFS filesystem to Linux.

VA Linux Systems hires kernel hacker Ted Ts'o.

Slackware 4.0 is released.

Corel's WordPerfect for Linux generates over 1 million download attempts.

LinuxPR.com is launched by the LinuxToday folks; it is a news site specializing in Linux-related press releases.

The inaugural issue of Havoc Pennington's now-weekly Gnome Development Summary goes out.

Projects to produce secure Linux distributions come into the news, with the birth of three projects, SecureLinux, Khaos Linux and Bastille Linux.

Linux-Mandrake 6.0 is released (announcement here).

The Linux Counter exceeds 100,000 entries on May 26, at 8:09 GMT. (Counter here).

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