The 2007 Linux and free software timeline [LWN.net]

Welcome to the tenth annual LWN Linux and free software timeline. In what has become a longstanding tradition, LWN finishes each year with a collection of the most important events from the last twelve months.

This is version 0.9 of the 2007 timeline. There are certainly errors and omissions; if you find any, please send them to timeline@lwn.net rather than posting them as comments.

The development of the LWN.net Linux Timeline was supported by LWN subscribers; if you like what you see, please consider subscribing to LWN.

January: Nouveau driver pledge, GPL Second Life, LCA, ...
February: Bitfrost, 2.6.20, RTLinux, Robbins, Raymond, ...
March: RSDL, RHEL5, Murdock, Beryl/Compiz, ...
April: OpenBSD, Debian 4.0, CFS, 2.6.21, ...
May: Python 3000, 235 violated patents, Indiana, Fedora 7, ...
June: Emacs, Microsoft deals, Btrfs, GPLv3, ...

July: Slackware 12, 2.6.22, CUPS, CPAL, ...
August: SCO loses, ClamAV, OpenBSD, ...
September: NetAPP/Sun, Kernel summit, ATI opens up, SCO bankruptcy, ...
October: 2.6.23, openSUSE 10.3, Gutsy, GNOME/OOXML, ...
November: Fedora 8, KDE 4.0-rc, lawsuits, ...
December: RHE-MRG, qmail, HTML5 without Theora, ...

Thanks to the following people for suggestions which have improved this year's timeline:

Xavier Bestel
Chromatic
Norman Gaywood
Jim Gettys

For the historically minded, the timelines for the previous nine years remain available:

1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

(Log in to post comments)

suggestion: November

Posted Dec 21, 2007 23:30 UTC (Fri) by grouch (subscriber, #27289) [Link]

I think the "Give one, get one" program, begun November 12, is a significant event for Linux and free software. News coverage such as Bill Board's article in the BBC, " Give me rice, but give me a laptop too", give an indication of the importance of OLPC. The G1G1 program provides the opportunity for individuals outside of the target groups to purchase the laptop. It seems to me that such an adaptation of the plans for this extraordinary project is worth a mention.

Stable NTFS read-write support

Posted Jan 6, 2008 2:38 UTC (Sun) by szaka (subscriber, #12740) [Link]

I've sent the below email to timeline@lwn.net on 22th of Dec 2007 but got
no reply, so please let me copy it below this time since quite many people
invested a lot effort into this to happen finally.

Good Day,

Thanks to thousands of contributors over the last twelve years, Linux 
finally has stable read-write support for one of the most widely used and 
complex files systems in existence (Microsoft's NTFS estimated source base 
is over 500,000 lines, meanwhile FAT is around only 5,000).

In the same year the driver was included in over 100 Linux distributions, 
including all the major ones, was also ported to OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, 
Haiku, OpenSolaris, bigendian and 64-bit platforms.

Best regards,
                Szaka

--
NTFS-3G Lead Developer:  http://ntfs-3g.org

Stable NTFS read-write support

Posted Jan 11, 2008 21:26 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

That really is an impressive achievement!  Congratulations to everybody who participated.  I
salute you even though I personally haven't used NTFS since somewhere around 2002.  :)