The LWN.net 2002 Linux Timeline

I guess it's a pretty quiet week in kernel-hacker land. Must be, otherwise people would have better things to do than argue over KB vs. KiB. The alternative would be to conclude that significant portions of the lkml population prefer flaming to coding, and that couldn't possibly be the case, could it?

-- Eric Raymond

Linus breaks the 2.5.2 kernel with a new kdev_t type, thus beginning the 2.5 development series in earnest (Linus's posting).

gnumeric 1.0 is released (announcement here).

[Obelix] The Mobilix site is sued for allegedly violating the trademark on the "Obelix" cartoon character; Mobilix fights back.

Gopher 3.0 ("Furry Terror") is released, marking the first update to the Gopher package in some five years. Bet you haven't upgraded yet.

Samba turns 10 (announcement).

Jon Johansen is indicted in Norway for his role in creating and posting the DeCSS code.

[OpenPKG] OpenPKG 1.0 is released (announcement.

Aunt Tillie's kernel compilation problems hit linux-kernel, as Eric Raymond (unsuccessfully) tries to push his new kernel configuration code into the kernel. For those who missed them the first time, here are the thrilling tales of Aunt Tillie, nephew Melvin ("Autoconfigure saves the day. Possibly it even helps Melvin get laid.), and "girl geek" Penelope.

It's pretty clear we've all finally agreed that Linux isn't a desktop operating system. While server sales continued to grow--though more at Sun's expense than Microsoft's--whatever momentum existed for the open-source OS running on your desktop PC seems to have disappeared.

David Coursey, ZDNet

FreeBSD development moves to the FreeBSD Mall (announcement). As expected, Wind River drops FreeBSD, which it acquired with BSDi in 2001.

The South Korean government moves 120,000 civil servants to Linux (Hancom press release).

Lineo spins off its hardware businesses, which it had acquired back in the Bubble Days (announcement).

Credit Suisse First Boston is censured and fined for its handling of the VA Linux Systems IPO (ugly details here).

Lindows discloses its customer email addresses to Microsoft as part of the "Windows" trademark lawsuit.

Microsoft decides that security is important, and leaks memos to prove it.

[XF86] XFree86 4.2.0 is released (release notes).

If you think of the document you received as an isolated event, it is natural to try to cope with it on your own. But when you recognize it as an instance of a pernicious systematic practice, it calls for a different approach. Managing to read the file is treating a symptom of a chronic illness. To cure the illness, we must convince people not to send or post Word documents.

-- Richard Stallman on how to deal with Word attachments.

Redmond Linux is reborn as Lycoris (announcement).

Rumors circulate that AOL is to buy Red Hat, but they turn out to be false.

The W3C issues a new draft patent policy which strongly emphasis royalty-free licensing.

Ximian's Mono project switches to the X11 license (announcement).

LWN.net is unacquired and becomes, once again, an independent organization.

Eclipse.org releases a beta of its C/C++ development environment (announcement).

Zope 2.5 is released (announcement). MontaVista

MontaVista receives $28 million in financing from investors like IBM, Sony, Intel, and others.

Revolution OS hits the box office (announcement).

The Linux Standard Base v1.1 is released, along with v1.0 if the Li18nux internationalization standard.

Timeline home

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The LWN.net 2002 Linux Timeline - January