The 2010 Linux and free software timeline

[Posted November 5, 2011 by jake]

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

In what is becoming a fairly standard pattern, 2010 brought various patent lawsuits, company acquisitions, new initiatives, and new projects. It also brought new releases of the software that we use on a daily basis. There were licensing squabbles and development direction disagreements—all things that we have come to expect from the Linux and free software world over a year's time. Also as expected, though, were the improvements in the kernel, applications, distributions, and so on that make up that world. Linux and free software just keep chugging along, and we are very happy to be able to keep on reporting about it.

This is version 0.95 of the 2010 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 twelve timelines and some other retrospective articles going all the way back to 1998.

January: Linux.conf.au, SpamAssassin 3.3.0, Firefox 3.6, Mobile Firefox, ...
February: MeeGo announced, FOSDEM, OpenOffice.org 3.2, Linux 2.6.33, Apache turns 15, ...
March: Ubuntu One music store, Apple sues HTC, Ubuntu goes purple, Novell owns Unix copyrights, ...
April: Embedded Linux Conference, Perl 5.12.0, GCC 4.5.0, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, ...
May: systemd announced, Linux 2.6.34, WebM launches, Fedora 13, MeeGo 1.0, ...
June: Linaro announced, LinuxTag, Bilski ruling disappoints, HTTPS Everywhere, ...

July: Python 2.7, OpenSolaris board issues ultimatum, Akademy and GUADEC, Battle for Wesnoth app, ...
August: Linux 2.6.35, BusyBox prevails again, LinuxCon, Oracle sues Google, CyanogenMod 6.0, ...
September: Broadcom open wireless driver, Mageia announced, PostgreSQL 9.0, LibreOffice announced, GNOME 2.32, ...
October: Ubuntu 10.10, Linux 2.6.36, First GStreamer conference, CELF merges with Linux Foundation, ...
November: Kernel summit, Fedora 14, RHEL 6, First MeeGo conference, Novell acquired, ...
December: openSUSE Tumbleweed, KOffice forks, Apache resigns from Java board, X11R7.6, ...

January

SpamAssassin suffers from a Y2K10 problem. It increased the spam scores of email with 2010 dates, which suddenly became much more prevalent (SA developer blog post, LWN coverage).

Application developers want systems that work the way the man pages say they work. They do not want additional or conditional restrictions. How many commercial applications start their installation instructions with "disable SELinux"? (Hint: lots)

-- Casey Schaufler

Ted Ts'o leaves the Linux Foundation for Google. His two-year fellowship as LF CTO, on-loan from IBM, was completed in December (news coverage).

The Linux laptop orchestra (L2Ork) debuts (news article).

linux.conf.au 2010 is held in Wellington, New Zealand. This is the tenth linux.conf.au (under that name, anyway), and the second held in New Zealand. LWN had extensive coverage from the conference (Overview, Community destruction, Package copyrights and license management, Filesystems, GCC static analysis, HackAbility, and Graphics drivers).

Canonical announces a switch to Yahoo as the default search provider for Ubuntu, starting with Lucid Lynx (10.04). This change is reverted in April and Lucid ships with a Google default (announcement, reversion).

SpamAssassin 3.3.0 is released. This is the first major release of the spam filtering solution since 2007 (announcement).

Ubuntu has had a lot of success by building an entire movement around one simple message, as articulated in Ubuntu's Famous Bug #1: "Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix." That's a great big inspirational message, and their tenacity in pursuing the vision implicit in that message has won them many fans. But it's also led them into compromises that are, I believe, ultimately bad for free software.

-- Greg DeKoenigsberg

OpenStreetMap data is used in Haiti earthquake relief efforts (Michael Tiemann's blog posting).

Firefox 3.6 is released (announcement).

Red Hat launches opensource.com to explore applying open source principles to other fields (About opensource.com).

The European Commission clears Oracle's purchase of Sun, paving the way for the acquisition to close (announcement).

Mozilla releases Mobile Firefox (aka "Fennec") for Maemo (announcement).

February

If there's truth to the allegation, here, then it should be possible to produce a cert. It should be possible to produce a certificate, signed by CNNIC, which impersonates a site known to have some other issuer. A live MitM attack, a paypal cert issued by CNNIC for example.

-- Mozilla's Johnathan Nightingale on the CNNIC uproar

Symbian opens up its code, though it is a short-lived open source "project" as its web sites will close in December (announcement, web site shutdown announcement -- these links may not function after December 17).

Facebook releases its HipHop PHP translator, which translates PHP to highly optimized C++ (announcement).

If you spend all day with your co-workers, socialize only with your co-workers, and then come home and eat dinner with — you guessed it — your co-worker, you might go several years without hearing the words, "Run Solaris on my desktop? Are you f—ing kidding me?"

-- Valerie Aurora

Matt Asay becomes Canonical Chief Operating Officer (announcement).

FOSDEM '10 held in Brussels, Belgium (LWN coverage).

Maemo and Moblin merge to become MeeGo. Nokia and Intel merge their mobile Linux initiatives under Linux Foundation stewardship (LWN article).

Fedora implements the "No Frozen Rawhide" plan, which will stop blocking progress of rawhide in preparation for releases (proposal, progress).

OpenOffice.org 3.2 is released (announcement).

Forks aren't always great, but I honestly don't think of forks as being a bad thing and I've tried to instill in Google the same ethic.

In fact, I'd say that the various forks of Linux, and how the Linux maintainers have roped back in some forks (and let others go on their merry way) is what made the Linux kernel great and not just a BSD rehash.

-- Chris DiBona

Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 8x is held in Los Angeles, with several LWN authors (and an editor) in attendance. (Moving the needle, Legal issues, Codeplex foundation and open source, Relational vs. non-relational, Color management, Ubuntu kernel development, Gnash, and 10,000,001 penguins).

LWN editor Forrest Cook departs (announcement).

Linux 2.6.33 is released (announcement, KernelNewbies summary).

The Apache web server turns 15 (announcement).

The Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) case (aka Jacobsen vs. Katzer) is settled on terms favorable for free software (Andy Updegrove analysis, previous LWN coverage [1, 2]).

March

The Ubuntu One Music Store added for Ubuntu 10.04 as a way for Ubuntu users to buy MP3s while supporting Canonical (LWN coverage).

yikes, that macro should be killed with a stick before it becomes self-aware and starts breeding.

-- Andrew Morton

Apple sues HTC for patent infringement targeting Android (LWN article).

Elliott Associates makes an unsolicited offer to buy Novell, which starts the process that led to an accepted bid by Attachmate (with Elliott's assistance) in November (press release).

Google is forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought. Rather than leverage the existing APIs from upstream projects like icu, libjingle, and sqlite (just to name a few), they simply fork a point in time of that code and hack their API to shreds for chromium to use.

-- Tom "spot" Callaway on Chromium's bundled libraries

Ubuntu updates its branding, moving from its brown theme to a purple-ish look, with updates to its logos as well (announcement). The branding change also impacts the location of window buttons in the default GNOME interface, which sets off something of a firestorm (LWN article).

Mozilla starts the process of updating the Mozilla Public License (LWN blurb).

Open Clip Art Library releases version 2.0 of its collection of SVG clip art graphics (announcement).

Sony removes "install other OS" support from Playstation 3 firmware "upgrade", so users can no longer run Linux on PS3s. (LWN article).

But having used both Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X, as well as Windows, I just don't think using Linux is tantamount to donning some hair-shirt to pay penance in the name of freedom.

-- Matt Asay

Novell wins ownership of the Unix copyrights, in yet another defeat for SCO in its attack on Linux (LWN article).

PHP 6 development process restarts after several attempts to complete the release, which was derailed mostly by Unicode issues (LWN coverage).

GNOME 2.30 is released (announcement).

The first MeeGo code release is made (announcement).

April

Since Emacs is just an editor, not a god, it cannot do miracles.

-- Richard Stallman

Subversion puts out a proposed vision and roadmap for the version control system (VCS), which recognizes that it has "no future" as a distributed VCS (DVCS) (proposal).

The Embedded Linux Conference is held in San Francisco (LWN coverage: Android and the community, Embedded Linux status, and Using LTTng).

You can't modify Fedora under F/OSS principles and still call it Fedora, just like you can't modify Firefox under F/OSS principles and still call it Firefox. Both of us do this to protect the good name of the project. We'd be in an extremely glass house-y situation if we tried to 'call out' Mozilla over this. It'd be ridiculous.

-- Adam Williamson

The apache.org infrastructure is attacked in a direct, targeted fashion using cross-site scripting and password brute-forcing (report).

Perl 5.12.0 is released and the project moves to a time-based yearly release schedule (announcement).

Java inventor James Gosling leaves Oracle shortly after Oracle's acquisition of Sun (blog post).

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is held in San Francisco (LWN coverage: Some notes and MeeGo)

Stefano Zacchiroli is elected as Debian Project Leader, succeeding Steve McIntyre (results).

GCC 4.5.0 is released (LWN coverage).

The Qubes security-oriented, virtualization-based open source OS is announced; it is built atop Xen and Linux (announcement, LWN coverage).

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS ("Lucid Lynx") is released (announcement).

May

Lennart Poettering announces "systemd" as a replacement for init, and it has gained traction in both Fedora and openSUSE though it has yet to be released in either distribution (announcement).

I resent being called an imaginary user. Being imaginary would seriously screw with my weekend plans.

-- Peter Hutterer

Red Hat and Novell fend off patent suit by IP Innovation, which, as its name might imply, is a patent troll. The suit was over some very broad patents that ended up being invalidated (LWN coverage of the suit, Groklaw coverage of the outcome).

All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn't mean or guarantee that it doesn't infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.

-- Steve Jobs

Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) founder Georg Greve receives the German Cross of Merit (announcement).

The Ryzom multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) code is released as free software after several years of almost being freed (announcement, 2008 LWN coverage).

Mandriva looks for a buyer (news article (in French), Google translation).

Linux 2.6.34 is released (announcement, KernelNewbies summary).

The answers to your Security Questions are case sensitive and cannot contain special characters like an apostrophe, or the words "insert," "delete," "drop," "update," "null," or "select."

-- Novel SQL injection protection as reported on BoingBoing

Linux Mint 9 is released (announcement).

Google launches the WebM media format for the web, which includes the VP8 video codec acquired when it bought On2, the Vorbis audio codec, and the Matroska media container format (announcement, LWN coverage).

Fedora 13 is released (announcement).

The Diaspora project forms to develop a privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook and other social networking sites. Its request for $10,000 in funding results in more than 20x as much in donations (LWN coverage).

The Libre Graphics meeting is held in Brussels (LWN coverage).

MeeGo 1.0 is released (announcement, LWN review).

The Free Software Foundation asks Apple's App Store to comply with the GPL on an iPhone port of GNU Go, which leads to Apple removing the app from the store (FSF blog post and update, LWN coverage).

June

Thrilled to read that Intel finally did the right thing, and dropped the requirement for (C) assignment (of whatever form) to be able to contribute to clutter - making it a truly open project; nice! I feel a sudden urge to contribute, something, anything now it belongs to us all.

-- Michael Meeks

The Linaro consortium is announced, which seeks to simplify the ARM Linux landscape (announcement, LWN article).

Rockbox 3.6 is released, with many new features for the free music player firmware (announcement, LWN review).

LinuxTag is held in Berlin, Germany (LWN coverage: Mark Shuttleworth, Thomas Gleixner, and Stefano Zacchiroli)

Another, seemingly final, setback for SCO in SCO v. Novell (Groklaw report).

Most mixers are self-contained and not hackable, but Siciliano says many home automation systems tap into appliances such as blenders and coffee machines. These home networks are then open to attack in surprising ways: A hacker might turn on the blender from outside your home to distract you as he sneaks in a back window, he warns.

-- Fox News hypes "hacker" threats

SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) is held in Spartanburg, South Carolina (USA) (LWN coverage).

GNOME finalizes speaker guidelines, which are meant to reduce friction and present a more welcoming face to newcomers (guidelines, LWN coverage).

The US Supreme Court rules in the Bilski case, which affirms the lower court's ruling against the Bilski patent, but does not make hoped-for changes to the patentability of software (LWN article).

File locking on Linux is just broken. The broken semantics of POSIX locking show that the designers of this API apparently never have tried to actually use it in real software. It smells a lot like an interface that kernel people thought makes sense but in reality doesn't when you try to use it from userspace.

-- Lennart Poettering

FFmpeg 0.6 is released with support for WebM and better HTML5 compatibility (announcement).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launches HTTPS Everywhere, which is a Firefox plugin to promote better web security (LWN article).

Jared Smith becomes the new Fedora Project Leader, succeeding Paul Frields (announcement).

July

Python 2.7 is released as the last major version in the 2.x series (announcement).

When a respected information source covers something where you have on-the-ground experience, the result is often to make you wonder how much fecal matter you've swallowed in areas outside your own expertise.

-- Rusty Russell

3D graphics drivers that require proprietary user-space drivers (or "blobs") are blocked from inclusion in the kernel by graphics maintainer Dave Airlie (LWN coverage).

OpenSolaris governing board issues an ultimatum to Oracle threatening dissolution if no contact person is put forward by Oracle (news article).

The first draft of an Open Source Hardware Definition is released (draft, version 1.1).

Akademy, KDE's yearly conference, is held in Tampere, Finland (wrap-up press release).

ISO changes its standardization processes to avoid some of the abuses seen in Microsoft's OOXML push (LWN coverage).

The Battle for Wesnoth struggles with possible GPL violations because of its appearance in the Apple App Store, which to some extent parallels the Gnu Go problems in May (LWN article).

I appreciate the fact that [Motorola's Lori] Fraleigh and Motorola are honest in their disdain for software developers. Unlike Apple - who tries to hide how developer-unfriendly its mobile platform is - Motorola readily admits that they seek to leave developers as helpless as possible, refusing to share the necessary tools that developers need to upgrade devices and to improve themselves, their community, and their software.

-- Bradley M. Kuhn

Ubuntu experiments with open font development, though the closed beta of the Ubuntu font does raise some eyebrows (LWN coverage).

The Women's Caucus publishes recommendations for increasing the participation of women in open source (recommendations).

The GNOME Users and Developers European Conference (GUADEC) is held in The Hague, Netherlands (LWN coverage: Luis Villa keynote, GNOME 3 release plans, Privacy, encryption, and the desktop, GNOME Shell, Banshee, and GUADEC notes).

OSCON is held in Portland, Oregon (LWN coverage: "Open phones" and Building communities).

FWIW, security by obscurity has a bad rep in some circles, but it is an essential component of any serious security policy. It just should never be the *only* component.

-- Guido van Rossum

Jos Poortvliet becomes the new openSUSE community manager, succeeding Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier (announcement).

The EFF wins three DMCA exemptions for cellphone unlocking, cellphone "jailbreaking", and fair use of DVD content (press release).

GNOME and KDE announce a second Desktop Summit to be held in Berlin, Germany in August 2011—it will combine GUADEC and Akademy much as was done at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in 2009 (announcement).

August

Linux 2.6.35 is released (announcement, KernelNewbies summary).

If my corporate overlords told me I had to use my Exchange "messaging" account for external email communication, they would get a quite clear 'no' in response. My response may also contain suggestions that they use certain other objects for purposes for which they were not designed.

-- David Woodhouse

AppArmor, the long out-of-tree kernel security module, is merged for the 2.6.36 kernel largely due to the efforts of Canonical (LWN blurb).

BusyBox once again prevails in a GPL enforcement suit (Groklaw coverage).

The fourth Linux Storage and Filesystems Summit is held just prior to LinuxCon (LWN reports: day 1 and day 2).

GNOME announces a new copyright assignment policy such that new modules that require copyright assignment need to get explicit approval (announcement, guidelines).

The Indian government has refused to let [researchers] review the machine, and insists that it's tamper-proof. Even after the initial report came out proving this not to be the case, the government has continued to insist the machines are fine and have no problems. Here in the US, it's quite troubling how much the government has relied on e-voting machines without allowing security researchers to really test them, but at least they don't arrest those who have been able to access and test the machines.

-- Mike Masnick

LinuxCon is held in Boston (LWN coverage: MeeGo, Media panel, One billion files, Two bootcharts, and LinuxCon moments).

Illumos, an fork of OpenSolaris, is announced in the wake of much uncertainty in the OpenSolaris community (LWN coverage).

The Linux Foundation announces the Open Compliance Program to help companies ensure they are complying with the free software licenses of the code they use (Linux.com article).

Oracle sues Google over the Dalvik Java reimplementation that's used in Android; the suit is for both patent and copyright violations (LWN's thoughts).

Combining both of their work together, they have been able to make a 20 minute long voice call from a baseband processor running a Free Software GSM stack. For all we know, it is the first time anything remotely like this has been done using community-developed Free Software. Five years ago I would have thought it's impossible to pull this off with a small team of volunteers. I'm very happy to see that I was wrong, and we actually could do it. With less than half a dozen of developers, in less than nine months of unpaid, spare-time work.

-- Harald Welte

Allison Randal is named as Ubuntu Technical Architect in addition to her role as Chief Architect for the Parrot virtual machine (announcement).

Vim 7.3 is released after two years of development on "Vi IMproved" (announcement, LWN review).

The OpenSolaris governing board resigns en masse as expected due to Oracle's unwillingness to appoint a liaison to the board (Simon Phipps's blog posting).

LinuxCon Brazil is held in São Paulo (LWN coverage: Linus & Andrew and Consumers, experts, or admins?). [CyanogenMod 6]

CyanogenMod 6.0—replacement firmware for Android phones—is released (LWN blurb and review).

September

Linux 2.4.37.10 is released for those still hanging onto the 2.4 series (announcement and 2.4 EOL plans).

Lessons? Well, as many have noted, reporters do need to ask more questions about too-good-to-be-true technology stories. Coders and architects need to realize (as most do) that you simply can't build a safe, secure, reliable system without consulting with other people in the field, especially when your real adversary is a powerful and resourceful state-sized actor, and this is your first major project.

-- Danny O'Brien on Haystack

The Mozilla Labs Gaming project is announced to foster web gaming (LWN blurb).

Microsoft's CodePlex.com code hosting site donates $25,000 for Mercurial development, assisting with project lead Matt Mackall's efforts to fund his work on the distributed version control system (DVCS) (announcement).

Linus Torvalds becomes a US citizen, which delays some patch testing while he registers to vote (lkml mention).

Broadcom releases an open source driver for its current wireless chipsets, but notably does not free the firmware for earlier chipsets (announcement, LWN coverage).

Nevertheless, everyone I know that has reviewed the newly released [Broadcom] driver code is being treated for eye cancer. I wouldn't expect to see it in F-14.

-- John Linville

Fedora decides not to ship systemd in Fedora 14 in a rather late-breaking change; it should reappear in Fedora 15 (FESCO meeting minutes, related LWN coverage).

The Mageia community fork of Mandriva is announced (announcement, LWN article).

PostgreSQL 9.0 is released (announcement, LWN article).

Diaspora makes its first code release of the alternative free social networking platform, though there are some major security concerns with the early release (announcement, security issues).

Qt 4.7 is released (announcement, new features).

Oracle updates the kernel used in its RHEL-based "Unbreakable Linux", moving from 2.6.18 to 2.6.32 which may show other enterprise Linux vendors that they don't have to drag old kernels forward forever (LWN blurb).

My package made it into Debian-main because it looked innocuous enough; no one noticed "locusts" in the dependency list.

-- xkcd

The LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice.org is announced by a large portion of the OOo development community (announcement, LWN interview with Michael Meeks).

Linux-Kongress is held in Nürnberg, Germany (LWN coverage: GSM security).

LinuxCon Japan is held in Tokyo (LWN coverage: Stable kernels, Kernel messages, and SSDs and the block layer).

GNOME 2.32 is released as the last in the 2.x series (announcement, new features).

October

Smeegol, an openSUSE-based version of the MeeGo UI, is released. The project soon runs afoul of MeeGo trademark issues (announcement, LWN trademark issue coverage and Smeegol review).

When you build software in Java and the JVM, you are being locked into only running it on a platform controlled by a single company - Oracle. Oracle is working to maintain this platform control, by refusing to remove the field of use clauses in the TCK, effectively preventing Apache Harmony from ever being able to ship a real release. The lawsuit against Google also confirms Oracle belief about using their control of the platform aggressively.

-- Paul Querna

The LLVM compiler project releases version 2.8, including major improvements to the Clang C++ support and two new projects: libc++ and LLDB (announcement).

The Software Freedom Conservancy appoints Bradley M. Kuhn as its full-time executive director (LWN blurb and interview).

Red Hat settles a patent case with the patent troll Acacia, but shares no details of the settlement terms (InternetNews blog posting).

The Utah Open Source Conference is held in Sandy, UT (LWN coverage: Learning from failure, Inexpensive audio/video recording, and Applying open source ideals).

Security measures should report to the system owner -- not to the ISP or the manufacturer. The owner of the machine should determine which software it's appropriate for it to run. This whole idea of collectivist "approval" of your computing environment gives me the willies.

-- John Gilmore

Microsoft VP Scott Charney suggests barring computers without a "health certificate" from the internet as a way to fight botnets and other internet security threats. Of course, those certificates would have to be issued by Microsoft. (blog posting).

Ubuntu 10.10 ("Maverick Meerkat") is released (announcement).

Debian welcomes non-packaging contributors as project members in a landslide vote: 285-14 (vote results).

The Open Document Format Plugfest is held in Brussels, Belgium to discuss interoperability between ODF-supporting applications (LWN coverage).

This means that if you write a JavaScript implementation that does not faithfully reproduce the bug that arithmetic on integers greater than 2^53 silently does something stupid, then your implementation of the language is non-conforming.

-- Jamie Zawinski

The AsbestOS bootloader, which allows Playstation 3s to run Linux once again, is released (announcement).

The Free Software Foundation announces a hardware endorsement program to distinguish hardware that "respects your freedoms" (announcement, LWN coverage).

Linux 2.6.36 is released (announcement, KernelNewbies summary).

The first ever GStreamer conference is held in Cambridge, UK (LWN coverage).

The 2010 openSUSE conference is held in Nürnberg, Germany (LWN coverage: The state of openSUSE, The future of LibreOffice, and Making testing easier).

There is not one out-and-out success story of a company building a great high-quality custom user interface on the standard Linux stack, except Android, which is hardly a model of collaborative software development.

-- Dave Neary

Mark Shuttleworth announces that Unity will be the default desktop for 11.04 ("Natty Narwhal") in preference to the GNOME 3 Shell (ars technica report).

The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) announced a merger with the Linux Foundation at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE), which was held in Cambridge, UK. (CELF/LF merge blurb and ELCE coverage: The state of embedded Linux and Device trees).

The Yocto project for easing embedded Linux development is announced at ELCE (project home page).

A plugin for Firefox that sniffs web application credentials from wireless networks, called Firesheep, is released (LWN article).

MeeGo 1.1 is released (announcement).

November

The 2010 Kernel summit is held in Cambridge, MA (extensive LWN coverage).

And please also don't top-post. Being the antisocial egomaniacs we are, people on lkml prefer to dissect the messages we're replying to, insert insulting comments right where they would be most effective and remove the passages which can't yield effective insults.

-- Tejun Heo

Fedora 14 is released (announcement).

Stormy Peters announces that she is leaving her position as GNOME foundation executive director to work at Mozilla on the open web (blog post)

The Linux Plumbers Conference is held in Cambridge, MA (LWN coverage: LibreOffice and code ownership and Life after X).

Our real problem with tracing is lack of relevance, lack of utility, lack of punch-through analytical power.

-- Ingo Molnar

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is released (press release).

The Apache Software Foundation issues a warning that it will stop participating in the Java Community Process if the TCK tests are not made available to it; access to the TCK has been promised for some time (Apache statement).

Operating systems written by normal people rarely end up with desirable performance characteristics.

-- Matthew Garrett

The first MeeGo conference is held in Dublin, Ireland (LWN coverage: Visions of MeeGo, Beyond mobile devices, MeeGo security high-level view, MeeGo security framework).

AMD joins the MeeGo project (press release).

Novell agrees to be acquired by Attachmate, while selling off 882 patents to a consortium owned by Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and EMC (LWN blurb and article).

Security through bad mouthing the messenger for raising the issue is normally reserved for government ministers, IMHO it has no place here.

-- Alan Cox

GNU's Savannah project hosting site suffers a SQL injection attack that reveals users' encrypted passwords (LWN blurb).

CentOS struggles with its efforts to release its rebranding of RHEL 6 (LWN coverage).

Novell puts out a message to assure those worried that Attachmate will retain the Unix copyrights even after the acquisition closes (brief message).

December

A generic anti-harassment policy for open source conferences is developed in the wake of numerous sexual (and other) harassment incidents (LWN article).

Unfortunately, my government does not agree with my definition of winning. They think that living in fear and trying desperately to keep us all 100% safe while flying is the most effective way to fight terrorism. It reminds me of a boss that told me he liked it when people lived in fear of being fired, they worked harder. I told him being fired held no fear for me. When you live in fear, you do irrational things - like sending millions of people's shoes through an xray scanner every day.

-- Stormy Peters

The Linux Foundation publishes its annual kernel development report (announcement).

The openSUSE "Tumbleweed" project to create a rolling release is announced (announcement, LWN coverage).

A Linux client for the Ryzom MMORPG is released (LWN article).

The GRUB bootloader accepts code to support booting from ZFS and releases the code under the GPLv3, without a copyright assignment (LWN article).

KOffice forks (or splits) and becomes the Calligra Suite (LWN article).

The Hudson continuous integration server runs into Oracle interference when trying to change its development infrastructure in yet another example of the software giant not quite understanding free software communities (LWN blurb).

Also, anytime you are creating a new commit with the same changes as another commit, you are destroying `git blame`'s ability to tell you who to flog publicly. And as we all know, public floggings are the lifeblood of software development teams.

-- Paul Stadig

Google announces the availability of Android 2.3 ("Gingerbread"), along with a software development kit and a new flagship phone: the Nexus S (2.3 announcement, Nexus S announcement, code release).

Matt Asay announces his resignation as Canonical's COO in order to join a mobile web application startup (blog post).

The Yocto project has a two-day summit in San Francisco involving 40 members of the embedded Linux community (LWN coverage).

An allegation is made that the US FBI paid to have a backdoor put into OpenBSD's IPSEC implementation, though it is still unclear whether there is any truth to it (LWN blurb, update from Theo de Raadt).

The obvious choice would be 'yugo', to honor fine eastern European solutions for mobility.

-- Teemu Ikonen suggests a name for Debian's MeeGo packages

The Apache Software Foundation resigns from the Java Community Process executive board as it previously warned that it would over the availability of the TCK tests (LWN blurb).

Richard Purdie is named as a Linux Foundation fellow to work on the Yocto project and other related tools (announcement).

Several projects announce that they have become licensees of the Open Invention Network, which collects patents for the defense of free software projects (LWN blurbs: Gentoo, The Document Foundation (LibreOffice), and KDE).

FOSS.IN announces that 2010 will be the last year it is held; it has been the premier free and open source conference in India over the last decade or so (LWN posting).

X11R7.6 is released (announcement).

Openwall GNU/*/Linux 3.0 is released, which marks the ten year anniversary of the security-enhanced Linux distribution (announcement).