The 2009 Linux and free software timeline

Here is LWN's twelfth annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year.

2009 offered few surprises to those that have been following Linux and free software for as long as we have. As expected, there were new releases of many of the tools and underlying infrastructure that we use on a daily basis. There were also lawsuits over software patents, arguments over licensing, and various security flaws found and fixed. Distributions were packaged up and released, more phones and other devices with Linux and free software were sold, and so forth. All part of the march to "world domination". We look forward to 2010—and beyond.

This year we will be breaking things up into quarters, and this is our report on April-June 2009. Over the next few weeks, we will be putting out timelines of the other two quarters of the year.

First quarter timeline (Jan-Mar 2009)

This is version 0.8 of the 2009 timeline. There are almost certainly some errors or omissions; if you find any, please send them to timeline@lwn.net.

LWN subscribers have paid for the development of this timeline, along with previous timelines and the weekly editions. If you like what you see here, or elsewhere on the site, please consider subscribing to LWN.

For those with a nostalgic bent, our timeline index page has links to the previous eleven timelines and some other retrospective articles going all the way back to 1998.

April

When I joined in 2001, Debian was The Distribution that a lot of users were using and all my friends knowing Free Software were dreaming of contributing to. Things have changed since then: newbies now use Ubuntu or Fedora, and contributors can easily join their communities. Debian is too often seen as the old distro that some old timers still use, having a process to join which is not worth trying. The Debian value that needs to be improved the most is changing that: putting Debian back into its place.

-- Debian project leader candidate Stefano "Zack" Zacchiroli

CentOS 5.3 released. (announcement)

Ardour, the multi-track audio editor, releases version 2.8. (announcement)

Intel turns over stewardship of Moblin to the Linux Foundation. (press release)

SGI acquired by Rackable Systems for $25 million. (press release)

Openmoko downsizes and stops work on the GTA03 to focus on the then-mysterious "Project B" (Steve Mosher email, PDF slides from Sean Moss-Pultz's presentation)

BIOS writers tend to have been on pain medication for so long that they can hardly remember their own name, much less actually make sure they follow all the documentation.

-- Linus Torvalds

Steve McIntyre is re-elected as Debian project leader. (announcement)

Oracle buys Sun, though surely they didn't think it would be held up in the EU regulatory process until at least December. (announcement)

GCC 4.4.0 is released. (announcement, LWN coverage)

Because I care about folks who don't make computing their life blood, I think the consumer story is a really interesting one. So for that reason, I think netbooks are really fascinating.

-- Mark Shuttleworth

Ubuntu 9.04, "Jaunty Jackalope", is released. (announcement)

NetBSD 5.0 is released. (announcement, LWN review)

Mandriva 2009 Spring (2009.1) released. (announcement)

May

We believe that you can't make software that pleases everyone. You can make software that pleases experts, but most of the time non-experts hate that software.

-- GNOME Foundation board member Luis Villa

A patch to avoid Microsoft's VFAT patent claim, which was asserted in the TomTom lawsuit, is proposed on linux-kernel. (LWN article)

OpenBSD 4.5 is released. (announcement)

Debian announces a switch to EGLIBC, instead of glibc for its C runtime library. (announcement, LWN article)

The GNOME volume control exposed a lot of low-level hardware-specific features that only a tiny minority of people actually really understood, and the PA volume control exposed a lot of low-level software features that a slightly larger minority of people only actually really understood.

-- PulseAudio (PA) developer Lennart Poettering

OpenOffice.org 3.1 is released. (announcement)

AMD releases 3D programming guide for R6xx/R7xx chips. (announcement)

Slackware64 is released—based on Slackware 13.0, it is the first official 64-bit Slackware release. (announcement)

Cisco and the Free Software Foundation settle a GPL compliance lawsuit; Cisco will appoint a Free Software Director for its Linksys subsidiary. (announcement) [Linux
Mint]

Linux Mint 7 ("Gloria") distribution is released (announcement, LWN review)

A few months ago, I had to dive into the configuration of sendmail to make a very small change. It turns out I spent almost an hour trying to make sense out of a maze of files that were plain unreadable.

-- OpenSMTPD developer Gilles Chehade

Wikipedia switches from the GNU Free Documentation License to the Creative Commons attribution-sharealike license. (announcement, LWN coverage)

TurboGears 2.0 is released; it is a Python-based web application framework. (announcement) [KOffice]

KOffice 2.0.0 is released. (announcement)

June

That's like saying that a squirrel is 48% juicier than an orange - maybe it's true, but anybody who puts the two in a blender to compare them is kind of sick.

-- Linus Torvalds

The US Supreme Court agrees to hear the Bilski case, which could change the software patent landscape. (SCOTUS Blog report)

The 2.6.30 kernel is released with the TOMOYO security module, nilfs filesystem, reliable datagram sockets, FS-Cache, and more. (announcement, KernelNewbies coverage)

Fedora 11 ("Leonidas") is released. (announcement)

Here, we find the quadruped leaping to action in a flash with its 20-second startup -- and do observe the animal's graceful form, achieved through kernel mode setting and Plymouth. We discovered, upon further examination, that the Leonidas maintains his sleek figure through the help of his new Presto feature, which allows him to keep his bandwidth trim while digesting updates that keep him healthy and content.

-- Paul Frields announces Fedora 11

Intel acquires embedded Linux vendor Wind River Systems. (press release) [Amarok]

KDE audio player Amarok 2.1 is released. (announcement, LWN review)

Ubuntu announces switch to the GRUB2 bootloader for 9.10 ("Karmic Koala"). (announcement, LWN coverage)

Sugar Labs announces Sugar on a Stick "Strawberry" featuring Fedora 11 and Sugar learning environment version 0.84. (announcement)

We've always said that the talent and creativity of those outside the company is superior to that inside the company. We have stuck to these principles. We've have opened up more than any other phone, from any other company, in the history of this industry.

-- Openmoko CEO Sean Moss-Pultz

Richard Stallman warns about dependence on Mono and C#,which stirs up a lot of controversy. (RMS's warning, LWN coverage)

Firefox 3.5 is released with private browsing, HTML5 video and audio support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis, a faster JavaScript engine, and more. (announcement) [PHP]

PHP 5.3 is released. (announcement)

Python 3.1 is released, focusing on the "stabilization and optimization of the features and changes that Python 3.0 introduced". (announcement)

The Ogg codecs (Vorbis and Theora) are dropped from HTML5, which means there will be no standard codecs for <video> and <audio> in HTML5. (announcement)

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The 2009 Linux and free software timeline - Q2

April

May

June