2005 Linux and free software timeline: May [LWN.net]

Second, some developers are being hired from the community to work on closed-source additions to PostgreSQL. That is fine and great, but one way to kill PostgreSQL is to hire away its developers. If a commercial company wanted to hurt us, that is certainly one way they might do it.

--Bruce Momjian

Debian 'sarge' is frozen at last (announcement).

The US broadcast flag rule is thrown out by a federal appeals court (article).

Novell acquires Immunix (press release). Former SUSE president Richard Seibt also leaves Novell.

Reporter Maureen O'Gara is forced out of Sys-con after her attacks go too far.

We've got several thousand man-years of engineering in [Java], and we hear very strongly that if this thing turned into an open source project - where just any old person could check in stuff - they'd all freak. They'd all go screaming into the hills.

-James Gosling

The Harmony Project launches with a goal of creating an entirely free Java implementation (announcement).

The Wine project gets legal representation from the Software Freedom Law Center (announcement).

Apple and the KHTML developers have a minor falling-out over the contribution back (or lack thereof) of Apple's changes (article).

It is certainly possible that this change will make some people decide that it is too painful, and they will go do something else. There is definitely going to be fall-out. It will be a few more months before things get back to normal. For the engineers who report to Linus, their lives just got worse.

--Larry McVoy, father of BitKeeper

Git has brought with it a _major_ increase in my productivity because I can now easily share ~50 branches with 50 different kernel hackers, without spending all day running rsync. Suddenly my kernel development is a whole lot more _open_ to the world, with a single "./push". And it's awesome.

--Jeff Garzik, kernel hacker

Nokia makes a patent pledge, but it falls short of what the community would like (statement).

Nokia announces the 770 tablet, a Linux-powered gadget (press release). [BSD]

FreeBSD 5.4 is released (announcement).

OpenBSD 3.7 is released (announcement).

OSDL lays off Linux developers to "rebalance" its work force toward marketing.

OpenDocument is approved as an OASIS standard (press release).

The Philips webcam driver is partially removed from the kernel (again) due to copyright worries (article).

<== April

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