Ten-year timeline part 5: Not just SCO [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
February 13, 2008

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...

October 10, 2002: BitKeeper flames return as the non-compete clause in its license comes to light. The sendmail source distribution is trojaned.

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.

October 31, 2002: the first cryptographic code is finally merged into the Linux kernel. The first Reiser4 snapshot is posted.
December 19, 2002: The Creative Commons project is launched. ElcomSoft (Dmitry Sklyarov's employer) is acquitted of DMCA violation charges. Kernel developers start to complain that the 2.5 feature freeze is thawing.
January 16, 2003: The U.S. Supreme Court decides in favor of unlimited copyright term extensions. MandrakeSoft enters bankruptcy. The SCO Group starts making noises about its "Unix IP."
January 30, 2003: SCO forms SCOSource and makes rather more dire noises about Linux.

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.

February 6, 2003: The MS-SQL worm infects the net - in about 15 minutes. LWN begins its porting drivers to 2.6 series.

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.

March 13, 2003: The SCO Group files a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM.

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.

March 27, 2003: Keith Packard is kicked out of the XFree86 core team. Red Hat Linux 9 - the last Red Hat Linux release - is announced.
May 15, 2003: SCO suspends Linux sales and sends a warning letter to 1500 Linux users.
May 22, 2003: The GNU and Ghostscript projects part ways. Microsoft buys a $10 million Unix license from SCO.
May 29, 2003: Novell claims that it, not SCO, owns Unix. Kernel developers get upset about the fact that there has been no 2.4 kernel release for six months. The 2.5 kernel gets a reworked char device layer, IDE tagged command queueing support and the USB gadget subsystem - seven months into the 2.5 feature freeze. The city of Munich decides to move to Linux.

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.

June 19, 2003: Linus Torvalds moves to OSDL. The kernel gets a massively reworked ext3 filesystem - eight months into the feature freeze. SCO raises its claim for damages to $3 billion and "terminates" IBM's AIX license. Software patents return to the European Parliament.
July 10, 2003: Andrew Morton moves to OSDL.

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).

July 17, 2003: The 2.6.0-test1 kernel is released; it includes the new anticipatory disk I/O scheduler. Slackware celebrates its 10th anniversary. The Mozilla Foundation is created.
July 24, 2003: Red Hat gets out of the boxed distribution business. Mozilla starts requesting donations from users.

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.

August 7, 2003: Novell acquires Ximian. Red Hat files suit against SCO. SCO offers the "intellectual property license for Linux." SELinux is merged for the 2.6.0-test3 kernel.
August 21, 2003: SCO shows some "copied code."

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.

September 25, 2003: The Fedora project launches. Software patents pass in the European Parliament. Sun's Jonathan Schwartz says "We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period."
October 16, 2003: Under pressure from the FSF and others, LinkSys releases source for its WRT54G routers.

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.

October 23, 2003: SCO gets $50 million from BayStar.
November 6, 2003: Novell acquires SUSE. A fight erupts over the "Linux Gazette" name.
December 24, 2003: SCO claims ownership of the Unix ABI. The 2.6.0 kernel is released. Red Hat acquires Sistina. The Mozilla Foundation asks for more donations.

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.

January 22, 2004: SCO files its "slander of title" suit against Novell. Linus gets dunked.
January 29, 2004: UnitedLinux dies a quiet death. SCO sends a letter to the U.S. Congress. Version 2 of the Apache License is adopted.
February 5, 2004: XFree86 leader David Dawes changes the project's license.

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.

February 12, 2004: The Grumpy Editor makes his debut.

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.

February 19, 2004: The Netfilter team settles its first GPL enforcement action in Europe.
February 26, 2004: X11 development moves to the freedesktop.org project. MandrakeSoft is ordered by a French court to stop using the "Mandrake" name.
March 4, 2004: SCO sues AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler. EV1Servers.Net buys an expensive SCO license - a move they certainly still regret. FreeS/WAN shuts down.

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.

March 11, 2004: The Anderer memo surfaces, tying SCO to Microsoft. The tenth anniversary of the green card spam.
March 18, 2004: Open Source Risk Management launches. MandrakeSoft files its plan to exit bankruptcy.

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.

March 25, 2004: BitMover claims that the pace of kernel development has doubled as a result of the adoption of BitKeeper.

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.

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