The 2009 Linux and free software timeline

[Posted November 26, 2010 by jake]

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 is version 0.95 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.

January: OLPC restructures, Qt goes LGPL, GCC plugin exception, ...
February: Debian 5.0 ("Lenny), Microsoft sues TomTom, X server 1.6, ...
March: Linux.com acquired by Linux Foundation, Linux 2.6.29, SUSE 11, TomTom settles, ...
April: Linux Foundation gets Moblin, Openmoko downsizes, Oracle buys Sun, ...
May: Slackware64, Cisco settles GPL compliance suit, KOffice 2.0, ...
June: Linux 2.6.30, Fedora 11, Firefox 3.5...

July: PostgreSQL 8.4, ChromeOS announced, Launchpad code released, Emacs 23.1, ...
August: KDE 4.3, SCO gets a reprieve, Unix is 40, openSUSE defaults to KDE, ...
September: Linux 2.6.31, Debian adopts Upstart, First LinuxCon, ...
October: N900 released, Ubuntu 9.10 ("Karmic Koala"), GDB 7.0, ...
November: Mandriva 2010.0, Go language, Fedora 12, ...
December: Linux 2.6.32, Thunderbird 3.0, Twisted 9.0, Shuttleworth steps down as Canonical CEO, ...

Acknowledgments: "American Dave" Kline, LWN user "xav", and A.M. Kuchling all made suggestions or corrections to help make this timeline better.

January

I will just note wryly that it used to be that I could compile 0.9x kernels on a 40 MHz 386 machine in 10 minutes. Some 15 years later, it still takes roughly the same amount of time to compile a kernel, even though computers have gotten vastly faster since then. Something seems wrong with that....

-- Ted Ts'o

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) restructures, laying off half the staff and "refocusing" in various ways. (OLPC blog) [Valgrind logo]

Valgrind releases version 3.4.0 of the popular program analysis tool for finding memory and other errors. (review).

Nokia announces the release of Qt under LGPLv2.1 for the upcoming 4.5 release. (announcement).

linux.conf.au is held in Hobart, Tasmania. (LWN coverage, 2, 3, 4, and 5)

The word "Python" was also catchy, a bit edgy, and at the same time, it fit in the tradition of naming languages after famous people, like Pascal, Ada, and Eiffel. The Monty Python team may not be famous for their advancement of science or technology, but they are certainly a geek favorite.

-- Guido van Rossum on how Python got its name

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 is released. (announcement) [Moonlight]

Moonlight developers work overtime to make President Obama's inauguration viewable on Linux, because the streams were only made available in Silverlight form. (article)

GCC and FSF announce a GPLv3 exception to allow for GCC plugins; the exception is for the GCC runtime library and will allow free software plugins, while preventing proprietary plugins. This particular incarnation of the exception is not adopted. (announcement)

The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability - all the benefits that come with open software.

-- Scott McNealy

KNOPPIX 6.0 is released. (announcement, review)

KDE 4.2 is released. (announcement)

AMD releases 3D register reference guide for R6xx/R7xx chips, which will help with the development of free software drivers for devices using those chips. (announcement)

The Linux Foundation kicks off the "We're Linux" video contest. (press release)

February

Zope 3.4 is released after two years of development on the Python-based web application server.(announcement)

Open source is not a lawless frontier at all. There are clear license terms that have to be followed, even though open source generally offers more freedoms than proprietary software. It's true, that many organisations are still struggling to understand open source and its license terms.

-- Martin Michlmayr

Red Hat hires former Mandriva community manager Adam Williamson to drive community involvement in Fedora QA. (introduction)

Miro internet TV version 2.0 is released. (announcement)

RPM version 4.6.0 released; the package manager used by Red Hat, Mandriva, SUSE, and others. (announcement)

Debian 5.0 ("Lenny") is released after "22 months of constant development". (announcement) The release is dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, a community member who died in a car accident. [Debian]

DragonFly BSD 2.2 is released—now with a production-ready HAMMER filesystem. (announcement)

At this point, DRM seems intended to accomplish a very different purpose: giving some industry leaders unprecedented power to influence the pace and nature of innovation and upsetting the traditional balance between the interests of copyright owners and the interests of the public.

-- EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry

Kurt Roeckx is appointed as Debian project secretary, after the previous secretary resigned in late 2008. (announcement)

Red Hat moves from Xen to KVM for virtualization in future releases, as expected by many after its acquisition of Qumranet. (press release)

Microsoft launches patent suit against TomTom, for patents on the VFAT filesystem among other things. (LWN coverage)

BASH 4.0 is released.; BASH is the Bourne-Again SHell (announcement)

X server 1.6.0 released. (announcement)

March

There's no easy fix for this - you need to be aware of what is right and what is wrong, but you cannot look at existing code to determine this.

-- Andrew Morton on kernel code

The Linux Foundation acquires the Linux.com domain, which they will turn into a community news and collaboration site. (announcement)

MontaVista starts Meld community site for embedded Linux developers. (announcement)

The "ext4 data loss" controversy heats up. (first LWN article) [Firefox]

Firefox 3.1 renamed to 3.5 to better reflect the scope of the changes. (announcement)

The Linux kernel gets a new logo for one release; "Tuz" is a reminder of the plight of the Tasmanian devil. (LWN coverage)

Linux leaders have a problem. Ever since Microsoft adopted the 'let's get along' strategy of licensing and interoperating, it has been hard to get people to volunteer their time for the platform, and interest seems to be waning.

-- Rob Enderle grasping at straws

GNOME 2.26 released. (announcement)

Parrot 1.0.0 released; Parrot is a "virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages". (announcement, LWN article)

Linux 2.6.29 is released with an experimental Btrfs, squashfs, kernel mode setting for Intel graphics hardware, and more. (announcement, KernelNewbies coverage)

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 is released in both desktop (SLED) and server (SLES) varieties. (press release) [Rails]

Rails 2.3 released—aka Ruby on Rails, the Ruby-based web framework. (announcement)

In Europe we had the habit of reading Slashdot, and reading about all the crazy patents in the USA, and we all had a good laugh. Then, very suddenly, we were faced with our own software patent problem.

-- Ciarán O'Riordan of End Software Patents

GNOME switches to Git, from Subversion, for version control. (announcement)

Microsoft vs. TomTom comes to an end, via a settlement, but, before that, TomTom joins the Open Invention Network and countersues Microsoft. (Groklaw settlement article)

Fedora issues report on August 2008 intrusion, seven months after it occurs. (report)

Python starts switch to Mercurial for distributed version control. (Guido van Rossum's announcement)

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

The Linux Storage and Filesystems Workshop takes place in San Francisco, April 7-8 (LWN coverage: day 1 and day 2)

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)

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)

October

X.org releases xorg-server 1.7 (announcement, LWN coverage)

Though the use of cookies and respective protocols in computer science are well documented we will not cover security aspects, notably related to excessive accumulative effects of consuming large amounts of cookies, rather we will focus on their creation, deployment, assessment and finally their consumption and the positive impact on the real-time Linux community we were able to observe.

-- M. Gleixner, M. McGuire [PDF] from the Real Time Linux Workshop

Gentoo celebrates its tenth birthday by releasing a Gentoo Linux 10.0 LiveDVD. (announcement)

OpenSSH also celebrates its tenth anniversary with the release of OpenSSH 5.3. (announcement)

TurboGears releases version 1.1 of the Python-based web framework. (announcement)

The Real Time Linux Workshop is held in Dresden, Germany. (LWN coverage)

Amarok 2.2 "Sunjammer" is released. (KDE.News report)

Nokia releases the N900 based on Maemo 5 and quite hackable. (LWN report from the Maemo Summit)

The problem? They are KILLING us. I'm not talking about market share, I'm talking about my recent converts from Fedora to Ubuntu. I haven't had to do a single thing to my wife's computer since I put Ubuntu on there except setup my printer. With Fedora I was on it almost daily.

-- Mike McGrath of Fedora/Red Hat

GDB 7.0 is released with reverse debugging, Python scripting, and more. (announcement)

CentOS 5.4 is released. (announcement)

OpenBSD 4.6 is released. (announcement)

Darl McBride is terminated as SCO CEO and as the longtime "face" of SCO's litigation strategy. (Groklaw coverage)

The Linux Kernel Summit is held in Asia, specifically Tokyo, for the first time. It is co-located with the Japan Linux Symposium. (LWN Kernel Summit coverage)

X11R7.5 is released with multi-pointer X, RANDR enhancements, and more. (announcement, Peter Hutterer's disambiguation) [SeaMonkey logo]

SeaMonkey 2.0 is released—the heir to Netscape Communicator as an all-in-one internet suite. (announcement)

Version 2.6 of the LLVM compiler is released with the first release of the Clang C/Objective-C compiler, better code generation, and more. (announcement)

But I'm going to want a strand of hair from the engineer responsible for that design, for my voodoo doll.

-- David Woodhouse

Word processor AbiWord releases version 2.8 with collaboration support, "true" SVG support, and more. (announcement, LWN review)

Ubuntu "Karmic Koala" (9.10) is released. (announcement, LWN review)

November

Mandriva 2010.0 is released. (release notes, LWN review)

A moratorium turns Python's conservativeness up to 11. If Python already has a reputation for being conservative in the features it accepts — and I think it does — then a moratorium risks giving the impression that Python has become the language of choice for old guys sitting on their porch yelling at the damn kids to get off the lawn.

-- Steven D'Aprano

One Laptop Per Child cancels the XO-2, opting instead for an ARM-based XO-1.75 in the near term and an XO-3 in 2012. (OLPC News report)

Python declares a moratorium on syntax and grammar changes through the 2.7 and 3.2 releases and possibly longer. (LWN coverage)

GNOME plans for a 3.0 release in September 2010 and 2.30 in March. (announcement)

Google announces a new systems programming language: Go—released under a BSD license. (web site, language tutorial)

Cavium Networks acquires MontaVista Software one of the first commercial embedded Linux vendors. (press release)

That spanned 5 files, 6 indirections and all that to open and fgets the contents of a file. And we still are doing an indirect call. All this work and jumping around when all I wanted is to have a function that can translate a PEM (NOT in a file!!!) cert into a X509 structure. But between the million or so functions nothing handy like that exists; or so I suspect but since there are no docs I really have to guess.

-- OpenSSL is written by monkeys

A fundamental flaw is found in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, which allows man-in-the-middle plaintext injection attacks. (LWN coverage)

openSUSE 11.2 is released with KDE 4.3, GNOME 2.28, OpenOffice.org 3.1, and more. (announcement, LWN review)

Fedora 12 is released with rpmdelta support, virtualization improvements, and more. (announcement, LWN conversation with Paul Frields)

Knoppix 6.2 is released with kernel 2.6.31.6, X.org 7.4, and more. (The H article)

The Linux kernel doesn't have all caps structures, we don't like to shout at our programmers, it makes them grumpy. Instead, we like to soothe them with small, rounded letters, which puts them in a nice, compliant mood, and makes them more productive and happier, allowing them more fulfilling lives overall.

-- Greg Kroah-Hartman

Google releases the Chromium OS source under a BSD license. (announcement)

Fedora 12 initially ships with a security hole by default allowing unprivileged users to install signed packages from signed repositories without requiring a password. (LWN coverage)

KDE repositions its "brand" by separating the KDE software into different groups: KDE Plasma Desktop, KDE Platform, KDE Applications, and KDE Software Compilation. (KDE.News report)

Vector drawing program Inkscape releases version 0.47, which has been massively overhauled from previous versions. (release notes)

FreeBSD 8.0 is released. (announcement, LWN review)

Linux Mint 8 "Helena" is released. (announcement)

December

People expect intelligent beings, whether organic or inorganic, to have some degree of common sense. Despite the decades of research sacrificed at the altar of artificial intelligence, computers remain almost completely devoid of common sense.

-- Paul McKenney

Qt 4.6 is released with multi-touch and gesture support, new graphical capabilities, more platforms supported, and more. (announcement, LWN coverage)

Linux 2.6.32 is released with devtmpfs, HWPOISON, more perf events features, kernel shared memory, and more. (announcement, KernelNewbies coverage)

Twisted 9.0.0 is released; Twisted is a Python-based event-driven networking engine. (announcement, LWN review)

If you didn't have an nvidia box you wouldn't care about this either. If I send you an LIRC remote will you bitch about LIRC not being upstream and Fedora/Ubuntu/everyone else shipping it?

-- Dave Airlie before he delivers Linus's pony

OpenInkpot releases version 0.2 of the free firmware for e-book readers. (announcement, LWN coverage)

Email client Thunderbird 3.0 is released (release notes)

Sugar on a Stick v2 "Blueberry" is released. (announcement)

Various efforts are made to get MySQL out from under the control of Oracle, either by license or ownership change. (LWN coverage)

So when I see another virtualization interface, I want the virtualization people to just argue it out amongst themselves. Thanks to the virtue of me personally not caring one whit about virtualization, I can stand back and just watch the fireworks.

-- Linus Torvalds

The Software Freedom Law Center sues Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and others for GPL violations on behalf of the BusyBox project (announcement)

Malware disguised as a screensaver is made available at GNOME-Look.org, which serves as a reminder to be careful where you get your bits. (LWN coverage)

Fedora 10 reaches end of life. (announcement)

digiKam 1.0 is released. (announcement, LWN review)

[Moonlight logo] Moonlight 2 is released. (announcement)

Mark Shuttleworth announces that he is stepping down as Canonical CEO effective March 2010, in favor of Jane Silber; Shuttleworth will focus on design and quality for Canonical. (announcement)