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 broke the timeline up into quarters, and this is our report on the final quarter, October-December 2011, though there may be an addition or two for December. The previous quarters can be found as follows:

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.

October

Red Hat acquires Gluster, the makers of the open source GlusterFS (press release).

XML - the kudzu of the internet.

-- Valdis Kletnieks

A rootkit that is alleged to be used for surveillance by the German government is analyzed by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC report, LWN blurb).

WineHQ database is compromised leading to the exposure of users' encrypted passwords (announcement, LWN blurb).

openSUSE announces the first release of its openQA distribution testing tool (announcement, LWN article).

ownCloud 2 is released; ownCloud is a free cloud storage and synchronization web application (announcement).

So you need another heuristic to handle that, and of course "heuristic" is an ancient african word meaning "maybe bonghits will make this problem more tractable".

-- Matthew Garrett

Plasma Active One, the KDE-based interface for touchscreen devices, is released (announcement, LWN article).

Samba changes its longstanding policy on corporate-copyrighted code, which relaxes the requirement for personally copyrighted code (announcement, LWN look at the discussion from July).

Subversion 1.7.0 is released (announcement, release notes).

The time zone database is briefly shut down due to copyright complaints from an astrology company (LWN blurb and article).

KDE celebrates its 15th anniversary (reflections from Cornelius Schumacher, LWN article).

For a while people were promoting the idea that its good to be lenient in what you accept as input and strict in what you send out. I think people are starting to realize that was a horrid mistake since now they're getting utter crap and people don't even know what right is anymore.

-- Peter Zijlstra

Ubuntu 11.10 ("Oneiric Ocelot") is released (announcement, release notes).

Dennis Ritchie, of Unix and C fame, passes away (LWN blurb, Rob Pike's Google+ "obituary").

Linux 3.1 is released (announcement, KernelNewbies summary, A look at the 3.1 development cycle).

The 13th Realtime Linux Workshop is held in Prague, Czech Republic, October 20-22 (Realtime minisummit coverage, Proceedings).

The 2011 Kernel summit is held October 23-25 in Prague (LWN coverage).

Debian is pretty bad at making choices. Almost always, when faced with a need to choose between alternative solutions for the same problem, we choose all of them. For example, we support pretty much every init implementation, various implementations of /bin/sh, and we even have at least three entirely different kernels.

-- Lars Wirzenius

Lisp creator John McCarthy passes away at 84 (TechCrunch obituary).

The second GStreamer conference is held in Prague, October 24-25 (LWN coverage: GStreamer 1.0 and 0.10 and Xiph.org).

LinuxCon Europe is held in Prague, October 26-28 (LWN coverage: Kernel panel, UMMS, an audio/video abstraction layer and A btrfs update).

The Embedded Linux Conference Europe is held in Prague, October 26-28 (LWN coverage: Till Jaeger on AVM vs. Cybits, The embedded long-term support initiative, and Sandboxing for automotive Linux; Conference videos).

November

OpenBSD 5.0 is released (release notes).

It's important not to show a smug expression on your face while printing if users of non-Linux OSs are still dealing with driver CDs or vendor downloads.

-- Don Marti

The Trinity Desktop Environment releases 3.5.13 as a continuation of the KDE 3.5 series (announcement, LWN review).

Samba notes its first contribution from Microsoft employees, which actually happened back in October (announcement).

Fedora 16 is released (announcement, release notes).

Google announces the availability of the source code for Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich"), after withholding the source to 3.x (announcement, LWN article).

They went out of their way to let researchers in, and now they're kicking me out for doing research. I didn't have to report this bug. Some bad guy could have found it instead and developed real malware.

-- Charlie Miller gets banned from Apple's developer program

openSUSE 12.1 is released (announcement, release notes).

AVM loses its case to restrict anyone from modifying the GPL-covered code in its routers (gpl-violations.org announcement).

Barnes & Noble decries Microsoft's "trivial" patents used to fight Android (LWN blurb, Groklaw article).

Richard Hughes announces the ColorHug open hardware/software colorimeter (announcement, LWN blurb).

A serious denial of service attack against BIND 9 is seen in the wild (ISC advisory).

I admire and respect the fact that you can make free software do exactly what you want - that's precisely what I set out to support in founding Ubuntu. What I did not set out to found was a project which pandered to the needs of a few, at the cost to the many. Especially when the few can perfectly well help themselves, and the many cannot.

-- Mark Shuttleworth

Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers unveil "the Journal" as an alternative to standard Linux unstructured logging; the announcement is not met with widespread acclaim (announcement, LWN article).

YaCy, a peer-to-peer search engine, makes its 1.0 release (LWN article).

Linux Mint 12 is released (announcement, LWN review).

Cinepaint is resurrected and releases version 1.0 though it's rather unclear where the GIMP fork with support for 16 and 32 bits per channel will go from here (Libre Graphics World report).

December

Download.com is found to be bundling Nmap with adware/spyware for Windows users of the security scanner (announcement, update page).

Disclosing security vulnerabilities is good for security and good for society, but vendors really hate it. It results in bad press, forces them to spend money fixing vulnerabilities, and comes out of nowhere.

-- Bruce Schneier

extensions.gnome.org launches as a site for GNOME Shell extensions (announcement).

The LLVM compiler suite releases version 3.0 (announcement).

The QEMU system emulator releases version 1.0 (announcement).

HP announces that it will contribute the webOS code to the open source community (announcement, LWN article).

Ugh - and people continue to get exploited from a preventable, fixable and already fixed VFS design flaw.

-- Ingo Molnar on the continued existence of symlink races

Facebook releases the HipHop virtual machine for faster PHP execution as open source (announcement).

KDE announces the release of Plasma Active Two, the second iteration of its interface for touchscreen devices (announcement).

Rockbox 3.10 is released on the tenth anniversary of the music player alternative firmware project (announcement).

Note that only a witless moron could ever actually be confused (rather than simply annoyed) by "1 files". Unfortunately, we actually deal with these witless morons on a daily basis: they're called computers. And as it happens, they're actually much more likely to be confused by the difference between "1 file" and "2 files", especially if we were to switch to using the latter 6 years in.

-- Matt Mackall

BT sues Google for patent infringement in Google Music and the Android Market (LWN blurb).

CentOS 6.2 is released, right on the heels of RHEL 6.2 (announcement, release notes).

The Android mainlining project is announced; progress is being made (announcement, LWN article).

Qt 4.8.0 is released (announcement).

Google and Mozilla agree to financial terms for Google to continue as the default Firefox search engine (announcement).

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2011 Linux and free software timeline - Q4

October

November

December