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Ten-year timeline part 5: Not just SCO
Part 4 of this retrospective
ended in October, 2002, when LWN adopted its current subscription model.
That change brought a certain amount of stability for LWN (too much, we
might argue), but, in the wider Linux world, things continued to happen.
This installment picks up where the last left off.
During this period, the business of Linux was relatively quiet - not that many acquisitions, but not many failures either. But quite a bit was happening around legal issues, copyright enforcement, and more...
BitKeeper flames were a more-or-less constant feature in those days, but BitKeeper became an established part of the kernel development process anyway. In the October 10, 2002 edition, your editor wrote: "If Larry McVoy (or his board of directors) wakes up hung over one morning and decides to end free access to BitKeeper, the show is over." That was, unfortunately, an example of your editor's crystal ball working rather better than usual. The trojaning of sendmail was the first of a few such incidents. It looked like a scary trend for a while, but, in fact, the frequency of this kind of attack has dropped quite a bit in the intervening years.
By this point, there was a certain amount of discomfort over the direction SCO was taking. But nobody had any clue of just how weird it would actually get.
Remember the days of disruptive worms? MS-SQL was one of the scariest, in that it did most of its propagation in just a few minutes. We don't see to many worms like that anymore; contemporary crackers prefer to turn systems into zombies and rent them out.
And so it began, with SCO telling the world that the Linux community could not possibly have achieved what it did unless the work had been stolen by IBM. For the remainder of this retrospective, your editor will attempt to keep the number of SCO-related entries to a minimum. It has been quite an experience to go back and reread all of those McBride/Enderle/Boies/DiDio/Lyons/etc. quotes, and it is tempting to put them all here. But that temptation will be resisted; those who want to relive that bit of bizarre history in more detail can read the LWN pages directly or dig through the considerable resources at Groklaw. SCO is about as scary as Y2K now, but, in 2003, the SCO suit was a frightening event. To many of us it seemed possible that, maybe, one out of thousands of developers might have slipped something improper into the kernel code base. And, in any case, we were under attack by a company with millions of dollars to burn and a loud-mouthed CEO. The whole thing cost us a lot of time and anxiety - and, for those most directly involved - money. Nonetheless, your editor will reiterate his claim that, overall, the SCO attack has been good for us. We needed to improve our legal defenses; as Linux grew, there could be no doubt that people would attempt to use the legal system to grab a piece of the pie. In SCO we had an arrogant assailant with no substance; we were attacked by a clown. We got the ability to straighten up our processes, arrange better legal help, and prove that our code is clean without the inconvenience of facing a complaint with a bit of legitimacy. The community is now close to immune from copyright-based attack, and is much better poised to deal with similar attackers (patent trolls, for example) who could still do us some serious damage.
Novell's claim was clearly significant at the time, though it fell below the radar again for several months. In the end, of course, this was the factor which killed SCO. That is convenient, but almost unfortunate too: there would have been value in seeing the substance of SCO's claims demolished in court. In these days of fast releases, it is interesting to consider that, for the first half of 2003, there were no stable kernel releases at all.
OSDL was often controversial in the Linux community, but nobody doubted that providing a home for developers like Linus and Andrew was a good thing. Until now, neither had held a job where working on Linux was their primary duty. Meanwhile, few suspected how big the software patent battle in Europe would become - or that the anti-patent side would emerge victorious (for now).
Selling Linux in boxes was how Red Hat got going, so the end of that business was a clear sign that things had changed. The separation of Mozilla and AOL (which had bought Netscape) was a little scary at the time; it seemed that the project could fade away before the Mozilla browser became truly ready and that it was an Internet Explorer future for all of us. Things were a little lean at Mozilla for a while. Now that Mozilla is bringing in tens of millions of dollars every year, the idea that it once sought donations is amusing.
SCO, remember, "encrypted" its slides of "copied" code by switching them to a Greek font - a scheme which the community, somehow, managed to overcome. The code in question was straight from ancient Unix; it had been contributed by SGI, and had already been removed by the time it was revealed. After this, nobody worried that SCO might come up with the "millions of lines" of code that, it said, it could prove it owned.
Fedora started with all kinds of talk about what a community-oriented project it would be. The reality was rather slower in coming, but is beginning to be visible now. Meanwhile, Fedora was a useful (and used) distribution from the outset. The LinkSys settlement was the result of a long battle. It was an important early GPL enforcement action which led to the creation of a number of distributions created for the sole purpose of doing interesting things on LinkSys routers. The ironic result is that LinkSys almost certainly sold quite a few more units than it would have if it had continued to hold on to the code.
2.6.0 took almost exactly three years after 2.4.0 came out. For the few developers who had observed the 2.4 feature freezes, their code - which could be four years old at this point - was only now making it into an official mainline release. It was not yet understood at this point, but, once 2.6.0 came out, the "new kernel development model" started to take shape. Never again would we go years between major stable releases.
There had been trouble in XFree86 for a long time, but the license change brought it all to a head. This was the move which killed XFree86, led to the creation of the revitalized X.org, and, eventually, brought life back to X development.
The first Grumpy Editor article was never intended to be the beginning of a series; your editor was simply grumpy that the Galeon browser had gone the route of many early GNOME 2.x applications: less configurability, fewer features, and worse performance. The persona proved popular with readers, though, and the Grumpy Editor has been making irregular appearances on LWN ever since.
The attack on Linux users had been long foreshadowed - and feared. Regardless of the validity of its claims, SCO could certainly make life hard for Linux by attacking those who use it. The attacks were so laughable, though, that they had no appreciable effect, even in the short term.
For those who don't remember, OSRM was a scheme to sell insurance against legal attacks to users of free software. But, by this point, nobody was all that worried about SCO, and OSRM never did take off. On the other hand, MandrakeSoft did succeed in getting out of bankruptcy and is still with us.
This installment started with BitKeeper, and will end there. For all the complaints about BitKeeper and its associated "don't piss off Larry" license, few could contest the claim that kernel development was proceeding at a much faster pace. We needed a tool like that. To this day, it remains discouraging that we were not able to develop a distributed revision control system for ourselves until Larry McVoy and BitMover showed the way. If there was ever an itch in need of scratching, this was it. The next installment (which will most likely appear two weeks from now) will start with April, 2004 and come fairly close to the present. Stay tuned. (Log in to post comments)
Ten-year timeline part 5: Not just SCO Posted Feb 14, 2008 11:21 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] Yay for the Grumpy Editor! May he continue to be grumpy for many, many years ;-)
grumpy editor Posted Feb 16, 2008 19:38 UTC (Sat) by jbw (guest, #5689) [Link] Yes, I wish the grumpy editor was a weekly feature. Joe P.S. I tried putting a smiley (Unicode character U+263A, WHITE SMILING FACE) in my message above, but the software converted it to ☺. I had no trouble however with the left (U+201C, LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK) and right (U+201D, RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK) double quotes, so the software is selectively excluding some characters. Can this bug please be fixed?
Vaccine Posted Feb 19, 2008 5:07 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] """ In SCO we had an arrogant assailant with no substance; we were attacked by a clown. We got the ability to straighten up our processes, arrange better legal help, and prove that our code is clean without the inconvenience of facing a complaint with a bit of legitimacy. """ I've heard SCO described in many ways... but never before as, essentially, a vaccine. :-)
Ten-year timeline part 5: Not just SCO Posted Jun 13, 2008 1:32 UTC (Fri) by apeden (guest, #52502) [Link] I'm confused. "It was not yet understood at this point, but, once 2.6.0 came out, the "new kernel development model" started to take shape. Never again would we go years between major stable releases. " It's 2008 and the kernel is at 2.6.25. I'm not being critical of the kernel, mostly just wondering if I missed something.
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