2003 Linux Timeline: February [LWN.net]

Tux the penguin, Linux's beloved mascot, is rapidly becoming the financial services industry's totem animal of choice. In fact, it seems that the only steadily rising statistic on Wall Street these days is the number of companies moving to open-source systems.

--Wired

OpenOffice.org withdraws from the Desktop Linux Summit.

MandrakeSoft announces an end-of-life policy: 12 months for "desktop" products, 18 for "base" products, and 24 for "specialized server" products. (Announcement).

Reuters ports its Market Data System to Linux.

GNOME 2.2.0 is released (Announcement).

Reasoning, Inc. compares software defect rates in the Linux networking stack with the commercial alternatives. Linux wins by a significant margin. (Press release).

Lawrence Lessig wins the FSF award for the advancement of free software (press release).

The Desktop Linux Consortium is formed to promote the use of Linux in desktop tasks (Press release).

Mandrake Corporate Server 2.1 is released (announcement).

Oh, and as a sign that 2.6.x really _is_ approaching, people have started sending me spelling fixes. Kernel coders are apparently all atrocious spellers, and for some reason the spelling police always comes out of the woodwork when stable releases get closer.

--Linus Torvalds

The American Bar Association gives up on UCITA, the proposed "shrink wrap software law."

mICQ is trojaned to fail on Debian after a dispute between the mICQ maintainer and his Debian counterpart turns ugly.

The Embedded Linux Consortium Platform Specification is released (press release).

Lindows.com offers an anti-virus product for Linux (press release). [Debian]

The Debian Project Leader election comes down to four candidates: Moshe Zadka, Bdale Garbee, Martin Michlmayr, and Branden Robinson.

SCO Linux 4.0 is a high-quality Linux operating system designed for mission-critical business applications and provides customers with the base UnitedLinux operating system that customers need to successfully run Linux in business environments.

--SCO press release

SCO Linux 4.0 is certified with IBM DB2 (Press release).

Motorola announces the A760, a Linux-powered telephone handset (press release).

[Snort] Sourcefire gets $11 million in funding to develop products around the snort intrusion detection system (press release).

Citibank tries to suppress information on vulnerabilities in its teller machine security.

The MicroBSD project shuts down as a result of allegations that it infringed OpenBSD copyrights (by removing copyright notices).

SCO states it will earn $10 million from SCOsource in its second quarter (press release).

XFree86 4.3.0 is released (announcement).

<== January

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2003 Linux Timeline: February

Posted Jan 7, 2004 13:09 UTC (Wed) by Tadu (guest, #11339) [Link]

Myth:

mICQ is trojaned to fail on Debian

Fact:

mICQ, as distributed on micq.org, compiles to essentially the same binary on any Linux distribution.

Of course, you don't need to believe me. Just try it yourself on your Debian box (?=0,1,2,3,4,5,...):

cd /tmp        
wget http://www.micq.org/source/micq-0.4.10.?.tgz    
md5sum micq-0.4.10.?.tgz 
# compare to release announcement        
tar -zxf micq-0.4.10.?.tgz        
cd micq-0.4.10.?        
./configure        
make

The news entry also conveniently forgets to mention that Debian did remove my name from the list of authors of mICQ and refused to fix it, despite me having written large parts of current mICQ from scratch.

2003 Linux Timeline: February

Posted Mar 8, 2007 22:15 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

The spat may have been over reasonable grievances, but mICQ _was_ trojaned to fail on Debian. It was trojaned in such a way that the normal debian build procedures would produce a non-working program, although all the programs produced in the development phase would work fine. For details, see this discussion: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/02/msg01078.html

therefore:

FACT:

mICQ was trojaned to fail on Debian

2003 Linux Timeline: February

Posted Mar 9, 2007 16:52 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

"mICQ was trojaned to fail on Debian"

Well, mICQ's author inserted code to make the Debian maintainer look like a boob (and it worked!). Using the word "trojan" to describe this is a little strong, don't you think? While it may technically be correct, it almost certainly gives the reader the wrong impression. mICQ's author certainly did NOT have the same motives as 99.9% of trojan writers, and the outcome was totally different too.