2012 Linux and free software timeline

By Michael Kerrisk
December 5, 2012

Here is LWN's fifteenth annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world. We will be breaking the timeline up into quarters, and this is our report on April-June 2012. Timelines for the remaining quarters of the year will appear in the coming weeks.

January-March 2012

This is version 0.8 of the 2012 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.

If you'd like to look further back in time, our timeline index page has links to the previous timelines and some other retrospective articles going all the way back to 1998.

April

The 2012 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory Management Summit is held in San Francisco, April 1-2 (LWN coverage: day 1 and day 2).

Debian joins the Open Source Initiative as an affiliate (announcement).

The udev maintainer announces that the udev and systemd projects will merge, noting that it will still be possible to run udev on a system that is not using systemd (announcement).

I think one of the things that makes Debian off-putting and unwelcoming is that we're a little *too* obsessed with criticizing everyone's ideas, and what some people see as "healthy discussion" other people see as "hurtful flamewars over bike shed colors."

-- Russ Allbery

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby language, wins the 2011 Free Software Foundation award for the advancement of free software (announcement).

Red Hat celebrates becoming the first open source company to turn over one billion dollars in a fiscal year with a US$100,000 donation to open source projects (LWN blurb).

The Kubuntu project acquires a new sponsor, as Blue Systems hires two former Kubuntu developers away from Canonical (LWN blurb and article).

The 2012 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit take place in San Francisco, April 3-5 (LWN coverage: Trademarks for free software projects; The kernel panel; X and Wayland; The Linux System Definition; The future of GLIBC; LLVM and Linux).

We don't need a system to help us ignore bug reports; our existing process handles that with admirable efficiency.

-- Robert Haas

Maintenance of the Linux 2.4 kernel comes to an end, eight years after the release of Linux 2.6.0 (announcement).

PostGIS 2.0.0 is released (announcement).

The Samba team announce a fix for a remote code execution vulnerability (LWN blurb).

The 2012 Linux Audio Conference takes place in Palo Alto, California, April 12-15 (LWN coverage).

Stefano Zacchiroli is re-elected for a third term as leader of the Debian Project (announcement).

A couple of times I've said "It looks like you could use some help. Would you like me to co-maintain with you?" and have generally gotten a positive response. If it's put in terms of "Looks like you're busy, I can help" and not "You suck and should be fired so I can take over" people seem to be pretty open to it.

-- Scott Kitterman

MythTV 0.25 is released (LWN article).

FreeBSD 8.3 is released (announcement, release notes).

Calligra 2.4 is released (LWN blurb and article).

Nathan Willis joins LWN as an editor (LWN article).

gitolite v3.0 is released (announcement). [OpenSSH logo]

OpenSSH 6.0 released (announcement).

May

Geary 0.1 is released (LWN article on this GNOME-based email client).

The Defensive Patent License is released (LWN article).

OpenBSD 5.1 is released (announcement).

An Apple programmer, apparently by accident, left a debug flag in the most recent version of the Mac OS X operating system. In specific configurations, applying OS X Lion update 10.7.3 turns on a system-wide debug log file that contains the login passwords of every user who has logged in since the update was applied. The passwords are stored in clear text.

-- Emil Protalinski

The Tizen project announces the 1.0 ("Larkspur") release of its SDK and platform source code (LWN blurb and article). [Ubuntu logo]

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" released (announcement).

Yocto Project 1.2 is released (announcement). [Xfce logo]

Xfce 4.10 is released (LWN blurb).

The Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 is held in Austria, Vienna, May 2-5 (LWN coverage: Inkscape quietly evolves into a development platform; GIMP's new release, new über-core, and future; Unusual typography).

The inaugural Tizen conference takes place in San Francisco, 7-9 May (LWN coverage: Pitching HTML5 as a development framework).

Dell announces Project Sputnik, which is aimed at creating a commercial, Linux-based developer laptop (LWN blurb). [Apache OpenOffice logo]

Apache OpenOffice 3.4 is released (LWN blurb, pointer to an earlier timeline of the work on the project, and an earlier article looking at progress of the project).

The GNU nPth project makes a first release of its GNU portable threads library (announcement).

Open Build Service version 2.3 released (announcement).

GIMP 2.8 is released (release notes, LWN blurb and article previewing the release). [GIMP logo]

The Document Foundation announces a certification program "to foster the provision of professional services around LibreOffice" (announcement).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux turns 10 (press release).

Enough data has come in to satisfy me that with all the improvements in Linux over the last year, and with BQL, codel and fq_codel, that we've won a major battle in the war against bufferbloat

-- Dave Täht

ConnMan 1.0 is released (LWN blurb).

Kdenlive 0.9 is released (announcement).

PowerTOP v2.0 is released (LWN blurb).

PulseAudio 2.0 is released (announcement).

PGCon 2012 is held in Ottawa, Canada, May 17-18 (LWN coverage).

Mandriva SA announces it will return control of the distribution back "to the community". However, the Mageia community distribution that earlier forked from Mandriva declines to work with Mandriva's community effort (announcement, LWN article on the announcement and an earlier article on the status of Mandriva).

When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash. What secret sauce powered its success? The Net prospered precisely because governments — for the most part — allowed the Internet to grow organically, with civil society, academia, private sector and voluntary standards bodies collaborating on development, operation and governance.

-- Vint Cerf

The printerd project is announced (LWN article).

Linux 3.4 is released (announcement; KernelNewbies summary; LWN merge window summaries part 1, part 2, and part 3; LWN development statistics article).

Mageia 2 is released (announcement and LWN article).

LLVM 3.1 is released (announcement, release notes)

Nmap version 6 is released (announcement).

ownCloud 4 is released (LWN blurb).

Perl 5.16.0 is released (announcement and LWN article).

The jury in Oracle v. Google finds that Google did not infringe any of Oracle's patents (LWN blurb and earlier article on the case, Groklaw follow-up).

Simon Phipps becomes president of the Open Source Initiative (The H article).

The LibreOffice project embarks on a project to rebase and relicense the LibreOffice source code (LWN article).

I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?

-- Judge Alsup (Oracle v. Google) has a clue

The Software Freedom Conservancy announces that it is expanding its license compliance efforts after signing up multiple Linux kernel and Samba developers whose copyrights can be used in license compliance efforts (article).

Fedora 17 is released (announcement).

GCC explorer is released (LWN blurb).

RPM 4.10 released (LWN blurb).

systemd 183 is released; this release merges the udev and systemd projects (announcement).

The Linux Foundation announces the existence of the FOSS Bar Code Tracker, a tool for tracking free and open source software components (announcement).

In the Oracle v. Google suit, Judge Alsup rules that the Java APIs are not copyrightable (LWN blurb).

June

Managing a volunteer open source project is a lot like herding kittens, except the kittens randomly appear and disappear because they have day jobs.

-- Matt Mackall

Obnam 1.0 is released (LWN blurb and article on this backup system).

LinuxCon Japan is held in Yokohama, June 6-8 (videos; LWN coverage: Making kernel developers less grumpy; OpenRelief launches; One zImage to rule them all; Advice for new kernel hackers; The business of contribution).

From the tone of the hearing, and the language of the House resolution, we are being asked to believe that "the position of the United States Government has been and is to advocate for the flow of information free from government control."

If only it were true. The reality is that Congress increasingly has its paws all over the Internet. Lawmakers and regulators are busier than ever trying to expand the horizons of cyber-control across the board: copyright mandates, cybersecurity rules, privacy regulations, speech controls, and much more.

-- Jerry Brito and Adam Thierer

Debian accepts a diversity statement (announcement).

Linus Torvalds co-wins the Millennium Technology Prize (BBC report).

The Apple versus Google-owned Motorola patent litigation takes a surprising turn as Judge Richard Posner dismisses the case, calling the patent system "dysfunctional" (GigaOm article). [Emacs logo]

Emacs 24.1 is released (announcement).

MPlayer 1.1 is released (LWN blurb).

X11R7.7 is released (announcement and LWN article). [X.Org logo]

SystemTap 1.8 is released (announcement).

Ulogd 2.0.0 is released (announcement).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation announces the Defend Innovation patent reform project (press release).

The Fedora and Ubuntu distributions outline their plans for dealing with UEFI secure boot (LWN article on the Fedora plan and the Ubuntu plan). [Red Hat logo]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 is released (LWN blurb, release notes).

Grub 2.0.0 is released (announcement).

Documentation is the sort of thing that will never be great unless someone from outside contributes it (since the developers can never remember which parts are hard to understand).

-- Avery Pennarun

The GNU C library (glibc) version 2.16 is released (announcement).

Many Linux servers misbehave as a result of the leap second added at the end of the month (LWN article).

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2012 Linux and free software timeline - Q2

April

May

June