2011 Linux and free software timeline

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

We will be breaking the timeline up into quarters, and this is our report on July-September 2011. Next week, we will be put out the timeline for the last quarter of 2011.

This is version 0.8 of the 2011 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 thirteen timelines and some other retrospective articles going all the way back to 1998.

July

A backdoor is found in the vsftpd source code (LWN blurb).

Most well-adjusted people would not stand up in a crowd of people and start calling people around them idiots. Just because there is a monitor and a network cable separating you from the crowd doesn't make it ok, and I am tired of it.

-- Rasmus Lerdorf

[Open Hardware logo] CERN releases version 1.1 of its Open Hardware License (announcement).

Project Harmony releases version 1.0 of its contributor agreements (LWN blurb, agreements).

Nortel sells a huge pile of patents covering networking and lots more to a consortium made up of Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Sony. Google also unsuccessfully bid on the patents (Reuters article).

The VLC media player reports that companies are bundling it with adware/spyware, which is an increasing problem for free software projects (announcement, LWN article).

I am quite at ease not participating in netfilter/iptables anymore while the discussion about IPv6 NAT becomes an issue again: I always indicated "over my dead body", and now that I am no longer in charge, nobody will have to kill me ;)

-- Harald Welte

CentOS 6.0 is released, eight months after RHEL 6 (announcement, release notes).

The realtime kernel tree moves to 3.0 after being based on 2.6.33 for a long time (3.0-rc7-rt0 announcement).

IBM promises to contribute the Symphony fork of OpenOffice.org (OOo) to the Apache OOo project (announcement).

Oracle acquires Ksplice, Inc., makers of the ksplice no-reboot kernel patching product (announcement, LWN article: Ksplice and CentOS).

As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it's simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux.

-- Linus Torvalds announces 3.0

Linux 3.0 is released without any major changes that some might assume come with the move from 2.6.x (announcement, KernelNewbies summary, and Who wrote 3.0).

Mozilla announces the "Boot to Gecko" standalone operating system, which is based on Linux (announcement, LWN coverage).

Several versions of Emacs ship without all of the source code, which does not comply with the GPL, though the FSF itself is not violating the license (LWN coverage).

The digiKam software collection 2.0.0 is released; digiKam SC is a photo editor and related tools (announcement, LWN review).

KDE Software Compilation 4.7 is released (announcement).

DebConf 2011 is held July 24-30 in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

August

The second Desktop Summit is held in Berlin, Germany, August 6-12; it is a combination of GNOME's GUADEC and KDE's Akademy conferences (LWN coverage: Companies and open source, Copyright assignments, Desktop crypto consolidation, Service design, Plasma Active

Every time I get frustrated with doing paperwork, I simply imagine having the job of estimating how much time it takes to do paperwork, and I feel better immediately.

-- Valerie Aurora

Samba 3.6.0 is released (announcement).

Debian celebrates its 18th birthday, just two years younger than Linux itself (announcement).

Google announces its intent to acquire Motorola Mobility mostly for its patents it would seem (announcement).

The first release candidate of the Mozilla Public License 2.0 is released (announcement, an LWN look at the update process).

But if you want to be taken seriously as a researcher, you should publish your code! Without publication of your *code* research in your area cannot be reproduced by others, so it is not science.

-- Guido van Rossum

LinuxCon North America is held August 17-19 in Vancouver, Canada and celebrates 20 years of Linux (LWN coverage: Clay Shirky on collaboration, Largest desktop Linux deployment, FreedomBox, x86 platform drivers, MeeGo architecture update, ConnMan, and Mobile Linux patent landscape).

COSCUP 2011 is held in Taipei, Taiwan August 20-21 (LWN coverage: Year of the Linux tablet?).

A serious denial-of-service attack against Apache web servers is seen in the wild (announcement, LWN coverage).

HP announces it is dropping its webOS devices (press release).

The 20th anniversary of the first Linux post is August 25; the now-famous "just a hobby" post to comp.os.minix.

The Certificate Authority system as it stands today is a house of cards and we're witnessing in public what many have known for years in private. The entire system is soaked in petrol and waiting for a light.

-- Jacob Appelbaum

DigiNotar issues fraudulent SSL/TLS certificates for several domains including google.com in July, but it is discovered in August (LWN blurb and coverage).

The kernel.org server is found to be compromised; the compromise affects various Linux Foundation servers as well; it will take some time for things to get back to normal. (LWN coverage)

Mandriva 2011 ("Hydrogen") is released (announcement, release notes).

September

The Linux Plumbers Conference is held in Santa Rosa, California, September 7-9 (LWN coverage: Development model diversity, Booting and systemd, Making the net go faster, Coping with hardware diversity, Bufferbloat update, and Control groups).

No developer ever thinks their change is going to break anything for anyone. It's the QA Law of What Could Possibly Go Wrong.

-- Adam Williamson

The Linux Security Summit is held with Plumbers (LWN coverage: LSM roundtable and Kernel hardening roundtable).

PostgreSQL 9.1 is released (announcement, LWN article).

The Qt Project is announced for more open governance of the free software UI toolkit (announcement).

Coherent vision isn't something that the kernel community really values.

-- Neil Brown

The openSUSE conference is held in Nürnberg, Germany September 11-14 (Conference wrap-up).

The OpenShot video editor releases version 1.4 (announcement).

UEFI "secure boot" and Microsoft's mandate of it for Windows 8 hardware starts to concern free operating system developers (Matthew Garrett blog posts: Part 1, Part 2; LWN article).

Not spending as much time sitting in meetings and fighting with other vendors is one of the competitive advantages PostgreSQL development has vs. the "big guys". There needs to be a pretty serious problem with your process before adding bureaucracy to it is anything but a backwards move. And standardization tends to attract lots of paperwork. Last thing you want to be competing with a big company on is doing that sort of big company work.

-- Greg Smith

GNOME 3.2 is released (announcement, release notes).

PulseAudio 1.0 is released (announcement, release notes).

Tizen, the successor to MeeGo, is announced, which incorporates technology from the LiMo project; the announcement comes less than a month after Intel says it is "fully committed" to MeeGo (announcement, LWN coverage).

The Berlios code repository announces that it will shut down at the end of the year (announcement, LWN coverage).

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2011 Linux and free software timeline - Q3

July

August

September