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 July-September 2009. We got a bit behind, so the timeline for the last quarter directly follows this one.

First quarter timeline (Jan-Mar 2009)
Second quarter timeline (Apr-Jun 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.

July

Perhaps we should require that the kernel developers and mainstream distribution maintainers all run Ardour for three weeks and attempt at least two multitrack/multichannel recordings. At least by then they'd maybe have a better notion of what defines a system for serious recording.

-- Linux audio maven Dave Phillips

PostgreSQL 8.4 is released. (announcement) [Chrome logo]

Google announces Chrome OS, a Linux-based, web-centric OS for ARM and x86. (announcement, LWN coverage)

VLC media player 1.0 is released. (announcement, LWN review)

You can't optimize a distributed file system for every use case, so find a distributed file system that is optimized for something like your workload – and use it only for that workload.

-- Filesystems hacker Valerie Aurora

Mercurial releases version 1.3 of the Python-based distributed version control system. (announcement)

The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is held in the Canary Islands—it is the first time that GNOME and KDE co-located their annual conferences. (KDE.News coverage)

Maemo announces a switch from GTK/Hildon to Qt, something that doesn't come as a complete surprise after Nokia acquired Qt provider Trolltech. (LWN coverage)

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review is launched. (announcement)

Collaboration is the engine of innovation in free software development, and Launchpad supports one of the key strengths of free software compared with the traditional proprietary development process. Projects that are hosted on Launchpad are immediately connected to every other project hosted there in a way that makes it easy to collaborate on code, translations, bug fixes and feature design across project boundaries.

-- Mark Shuttleworth

A local user privilege escalation vulnerability in the kernel, which (ab)uses NULL pointer dereferences is announced with a proof-of-concept exploit. (LWN coverage part 1 and part 2)

The Nmap security scanner releases version 5.0. (announcement)

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released its Launchpad source code under a free software license. (announcement)

Django 1.1 is released; Django is a Python-based web framework. (announcement)

Amazon fails in its irony detection and deletes George Orwell's 1984 (and Animal Farm) from users' Kindle e-book readers. (New York Times coverage)

Emacs 23.1 is released. (announcement)

Botnet simulation boots one million virtualized Linux kernels at Sandia National Laboratories. (LinuxInsider article)

August

Our experience on Windows is that, in order for Flash to do all the things that various sites expect it to be able to do, the sandbox has to be so full of holes that it's rather useless.

-- Chrome/Chromium hacker Adam Langley

KDE 4.3 is released. (announcement)

Novell devotes ten engineers to the openSUSE project, rather than have them work as time is available. (announcement)

openSUSE reduces maintenance period for new distribution releases to 18 months, down from 24 months. (announcement)

Since 2005, over 5000 individual developers from nearly 500 different companies have contributed to the kernel. The Linux kernel, thus, has become a common resource developed on a massive scale by companies which are fierce competitors in other areas.

-- Linux Foundation white paper [PDF]

An injunction against the OpenBTS cellular base station project is lifted, allowing discussion of the project by certain members once again. (announcement, LWN injunction article)

Ubuntu removes the controversial "multisearch" feature from Karmic Koala (9.10), because of privacy and usability concerns. (LWN coverage)

Arch Linux 2009.08 is released. (announcement)

KMyMoney 1.0 is released, after two years of development on the personal finance management application. (announcement, LWN review)

We recognize that Novell has powerful arguments to support its version of the transaction, and that, as the district court suggested, there may be reasons to discount the credibility, relevance, or persuasiveness of the extrinsic evidence that SCO presents.

-- appeals court in SCO v. Novell softens the blow [PDF]

Yet another kernel NULL pointer vulnerability is reported, in what is becoming a steady stream of such reports. (linux-kernel posting, more LWN coverage)

Desktop publisher Scribus releases version 1.3.5 (release notes, LWN review)

[Art of
Community] O'Reilly publishes The Art of Community by Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon. (announcement)

The Linux Foundation updates its kernel development statistics white paper, authored by Jonathan Corbet, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Amanda McPherson. (announcement, white paper [PDF])

If freedom is your concern then you don't need to "unlock" or "jailbreak" Maemo 5. From installing an application to getting root access, it's you who decide. We trust you, and at the end it's your device.

Nokia's Quim Gil

An appeals court rules that SCO's claims about Unix copyrights should go to trial, overturning the summary judgment that Novell "won" in 2007 and breathing new life into the SCO litigation circus. (LWN coverage)

openSUSE defaults desktop choice to KDE, though GNOME and others still remain as supported choices. (announcement, LWN coverage)

Unix celebrates its 40th birthday. (BBC article)

Slackware 13.0 is released, with support for 64-bit processors. (announcement, LWN review)

September

Linux is a 18+ years old kernel, there's not that many easy projects left in it anymore :-/ Core kernel features that look basic and which are not in Linux yet often turn out to be not that simple.

-- Ingo Molnar

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is released, with x86_64 KVM support, FUSE, the XFS filesystem, and more. (release notes)

Linux 2.6.31 is released with performance counter support, kernel mode setting for ATI Radeon chipsets, kmemleak, USB 3.0 support, and more. (announcement, KernelNewbies coverage)

It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely.

-- UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Alan Turing

Debian announces a switch to Upstart for boot-time initialization. (announcement)

Microsoft forms the CodePlex foundation to foster cooperation between software companies and open source communities. (announcement, LWN coverage)

Alan Turing gets a long-belated apology from the UK government for his treatment for being gay. (Prime Minister Gordon Brown's apology)

I really enjoy arguing.

-- Linus Torvalds surprises no one

The first-ever LinuxCon is held in Portland, Oregon co-located with the second-ever Linux Plumbers Conference. (LinuxCon event site)

The "Anti-Malware" industry is just snake oil anyway. I think the proper approach to support it is just to add various no-op exports claim to do something and all the people requiring anti-virus on Linux will be just as happy with it.

-- Christoph Hellwig

[Puppy logo] Puppy Linux 4.3 is released. (announcement, LWN review)

[LWN shirt] LWN finally makes T-shirts and other branded items available for sale. (LWN.net CafePress store)

GNOME 2.28 is released. (announcement)

libtheora 1.1 "Thusnelda" is released bringing faster decoding and better quality to the Theora video codec. (announcement)

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The 2009 Linux and free software timeline - Q3

July

August

September