2012 Linux and free software timeline

By Michael Kerrisk
December 12, 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 July-August 2012. A timeline for the remaining quarter of the year will appear next week.

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.

July

Popular pet names Rover, Cheryl and Kate could be a thing of the past. Banks are now advising parents to think carefully before naming their child’s first pet. For security reasons, the chosen name should have at least eight characters, a capital letter and a digit. It should not be the same as the name of any previous pet, and must never be written down, especially on a collar as that is the first place anyone would look. Ideally, children should consider changing the name of their pet every 12 weeks.

[...] We tried to call Barclays’ security expert R0b Ste!nway for a comment, but he was not available for 24 hours, having answered his phone incorrectly three times in succession.

-- NewsBiscuit

Akademy 2012 is held in Tallinn, Estonia, June 30-July 6 (LWN coverage: Defensive publications, Plasma Active and Make Play Live; The Qt Project and KDE; KWin scripting; Freedom and the internet; Contour and Plasma Active; KDE successes and areas for improvement).

Oracle Linux 6.3 is released (announcement, release notes, and LWN article on Oracle's attempt to draw users away from CentOS to their own RHEL clone).

Mozilla surprises Thunderbird users by announcing that it is pulling developers from the project (LWN article).

The first patches adding support for 64-bit ARM processors are posted (LWN article).

Open Font Library 0.5 is released (announcement).

Michael Kerrisk joins LWN as an editor (LWN article).

CUPS 1.6 is released (announcement, LWN article).

Firebug 1.10.0 is released (LWN blurb).

A number of the developers all went to a climbing gym one evening, and I found myself climbing with another kernel developer who worked for a different company, someone whose code I had rejected in the past for various reasons, and then eventually accepted after a number of different iterations. So I've always thought after that incident, "always try to be nice in email, you never know when the person on the other side of the email might be holding onto a rope ensuring your safety."

-- Greg Kroah-Hartman

Linux 3.5 is released (announcement; KernelNewbies summary; LWN merge window summaries: part 1, part 2, and part 3; LWN development statistics article).

The Debian project launches a new effort to clarify why Debian is not on the Free Software Foundation's free distribution list, though little has changed since then (LWN article).

Bison 2.6 is released (LWN blurb; Motion tracking with Skeltrack).

CRtools 0.1 is released (LWN is released).

GUADEC is held in A Coruña, July 26-August 1 (LWN coverage: Open source and open "stuff"; Imagining Tor built-in to GNOME; New funding models for open source software; Porting GNOME to Android; GNOME OS conversations).

August

Trust me: every problem in computer science may be solved by an indirection, but those indirections are *expensive*. Pointer chasing is just about the most expensive thing you can do on modern CPU's.

-- Linus Torvalds

The KDE project releases KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and KDE Platform 4.9 (announcement).

Texas Linux Fest is held in San Antonio (LWN coverage: TexOS teaching open source).

LibreOffice 3.6 is released (announcement, LWN blurb and an earlier article looking at the branding challenge facing LibreOffice).

Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.

-- Google

SCO files for Chapter 7 liquidation (LWN blurb).

CyanogenMod 9.0 is released (LWN blurb and earlier article previewing the release).

The GNOME project turns 15 (LWN article).

Calligra 2.5 is released (announcement, LWN blurb).

Valgrind 3.8.0 is released (announcement).

Digia acquires Qt from Nokia (LWN blurb).

PowerTop 2.1 is released (LWN article).

Ben Hutchings announces plans to support the 3.2 kernel until Debian 7.0 reaches end of life, which probably means end of 2015 (announcement).

FreedomBox 0.1 is released (announcement, earlier LWN article on FreedomBox as an alternative to commercial home routers). [FreedomBox logo]

A critical Java zero-day exploit emerges (The H article).

The third GStreamer Conference is held in San Diego, California, August 27-28 (LWN coverage: The approach of GStreamer 1.0; The road ahead; Linux media subsystems).

The 2012 Linux Kernel Summit is held in San Diego, California, August 27-29 (LWN provided extensive coverage of the main summit, as well as the associated the ARM minisummit, Linux Security Summit, and memcg/mm minisummit).

Most importantly, a series of leaks over the past few years containing more than 100 million real-world passwords have provided crackers with important new insights about how people in different walks of life choose passwords on different sites or in different settings. The ever-growing list of leaked passwords allows programmers to write rules that make cracking algorithms faster and more accurate; password attacks have become cut-and-paste exercises that even script kiddies can perform with ease.

-- Dan Goodin in ars technica

LinuxCon North America is held in San Diego, California, August 29-31 (LWN coverage: Funding development; Open hardware for open hardware; Dragons and penguins in space; The tragedy of the commons gatekeepers).

The Linux Plumbers Conference is held in San Diego, California, August 29-31 (LWN coverage: Realtime microconference).

MongoDB 2.2 is released (announcement).

The jury in the Apple v. Samsung patent suit finds in favor of Apple on almost all claims (LWN blurb, LWN article on look-and-feel lawsuits).

September

So yeah, I do acknowledge that both modes of working make sense, I just believe the default approach should be one where focus is on stabilizing things, not on developing new stuff all the time.

-- Lennart Poettering

Linux From Scratch 7.2 is released (announcement).

openSUSE 12.2 is released (LWN blurb).

Qubes 1.0 is released (LWN blurb).

QEMU 1.2 is released (LWN blurb).

Twisted 12.2.0 is released (announcement).

Yes I have now read kernel bugzilla, every open bug (and closed over half of them). An interesting read, mysteries that Sherlock Holmes would puzzle over, a length that wanted a good editor urgently, an interesting line in social commentary, the odd bit of unnecessary bad language. As a read it is however overall not well explained or structured.

-- Alan Cox

PostgreSQL 9.2 is released (announcement, LWN article on the 9.2 beta).

GNU patch 2.7 is released (announcement).

SyncEvolution 1.3 is released (announcement).

Cinnamon 1.6 is released (announcement).

The Linux Foundation announces the creation of the Automotive Grade Linux workgroup (LWN blurb).

Rackspace announces that it is handing over the OpenStack project OpenStack Foundation (LWN blurb).

The OpenStreetMap project completes relicensing of its database to Open Database License (announcement and 2008 LWN article on the motivation for the license change).

The second Automotive Linux Summit is held in Gaydon, England (LWN coverage: First signs of actual code; Automotive Grade Linux).

The X.Org Developers Conference is held in Nuremberg, Germany (LWN coverage: Status report from the X.Org Board; Graphics stack security; Programming languages for X application development; OpenGL futures).

GeeXboX 3.0 is released (LWN blurb).

Canonical decides to include Amazon search results in the Ubuntu Dash (LWN blurb).

If by "intuitive" you mean "the same as the old interface" then I must agree. Otherwise, I think you are just trying to hold on to what you know.

-- David Lehman

Tent 0.1 is released (LWN blurb and article).

GStreamer 1.0 is released (LWN blurb and article previewing the release).

GTK+ 3.6.0 is released (announcement).

GNOME 3.6 released (LWN blurb).

Slackware 14 is released (LWN blurb).

Open webOS 1.0 is released (announcement).

It is an accepted fact that memcg sucks. But can it suck faster?

-- Glauber Costa

Calibre 0.9.0 is released (announcement).

Python 3.3.0 is released (announcement, what's new in 3.3 document).

CIA.vc shuts down (LWN article).

Joomla 3.0 is released (LWN blurb).

Linux 3.6 is released (announcement; KernelNewbies summary; LWN merge window summaries: part 1, part 2, and part 3; LWN development statistics article).

(Log in to post comments)

2012 Linux and free software timeline - Q3

July

August

September