Here is LWN's fourteenth annual timeline of significant events in the Linux
and free software world for the year.
In many ways, 2011 is just like all the previous years we have
covered—only the details have changed. Releases of new software and
distributions continues at its normal ferocious rate, and Linux adoption
(though perhaps not on the desktop) continues unabated. That said, the
usual threats to our communities keep rearing their heads; in particular,
the patent attacks against free software continue to increase. But,
overall, it was a great year for Linux and free software, just as we expect
2012
(and beyond) to be.
This is version 1.0 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.
- January: Linux 2.6.37, Jenkins fork,
LibreOffice 3.3, linux.conf.au, KDE 4.6, ...
- February: FOSDEM, Debian
6.0, Ada Initiative, Linux on Jeopardy, Python 3.2, ...
- March: Linux 2.6.38,
Comodo SSL certs, Bionic GPL FUD, Firefox 4, GCC 4.6, ...
- April: LFSMMS, Yocto 1.0, GNOME 3.0, ELC,
Slackware 13.37, Ubuntu 11.04, ...
- May: UDS Budapest,
Linux 2.6.39, Fedora 15, Meego 1.2, Mint 11, ...
- June: LinuxCon Japan, Mageia 1,
Apache/OpenOffice.org, Firefox 5, Nokia N9, ...
|
- July: Project Harmony, Oracle/Ksplice, Linux
3.0, Boot to Gecko, KDE 4.7, ...
- August: Desktop Summit, LinuxCon North America,
Linux turns 20, kernel.org compromised, Mandriva 2011, ...
- September: Linux Plumbers, Qt Project, UEFI
secure boot, GNOME 3.2, Tizen announced, ...
- October: Ubuntu 11.10, Dennis Ritchie RIP,
Linux 3.1, Kernel Summit, LinuxCon Europe, ELCE, ...
- November: OpenBSD 5.0, Fedora 16, Android ICS
source,
openSUSE 12.1, Mint 12, ...
- December: LLVM 3.0, QEMU 1.0, webOS opens,
Android mainlining project, ...
|
For those with a nostalgic bent, our timeline index page has links
to the previous 13 timelines and some other retrospective articles
going all the way back to 1998.
Acknowledgments: Ben Hutchings, Edward Tomasz NapieraĆa, and Bernhard
Reiter made suggestions or corrections to make this timeline better.
Linux 2.6.37 is released (announcement, KernelNewbies summary, Who wrote 2.6.37).
It is no longer vital to work to keep Emacs small. Eight Megabytes Ain't
Constantly Swapping any more.
-- Richard Stallman
No more H.264 video codec support for the Chrome/Chromium browser as
Google focuses on WebM support (announcement,
update).
The Hudson continuous integration server project forks due to
fallout from Oracle's acquisition of Sun. The new project is called
Jenkins (announcement).
Free software's awfully like sausages - wonderfully tasty, but sometimes
you suddenly discover that you've been eating sheep nostrils for the past
15 years of your life.
-- Matthew Garrett
LibreOffice makes its first stable release, 3.3 (announcement,
LWN coverage).
OpenOffice.org also makes a 3.3 release (new features,
release
notes).
The FFmpeg project has a leadership coup, though it eventually
resolves into a fork in March, which results in the Libav project (LWN blurb).
Amarok 2.4 is released (announcement).
Nice to see it gone - it seemed such a good idea in Linux 1.3
-- Alan Cox won't miss the
BKL
Mark Shuttleworth announces plans to include Qt and Qt-based
applications on the default Ubuntu install (blog post).
Xfce 4.8 is released (announcement,
LWN preview).
linux.conf.au is held in Brisbane, Australia despite the efforts of
Mother Nature to inundate it. Organizers were quick to move to a new venue after catastrophic
flooding, and
the conference came off without a hitch. (LWN coverage: Re-engineering the internet, IP
address exhaustion, Server power management,
The controversial Mark Pesce keynote, 30 years of sendmail, Rationalizing the wacom driver,
and a Wrap-up).
KDE Software Compilation 4.6 is released (announcement).
Bufferbloat.net launches as a site to work on solving networking performance
problems caused by bufferbloat. (LWN blurb, web site).
The last IPv4 address blocks are allocated by the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (IANA) to the Asia-Pacific Network Information Center
(APNIC), which would (seemingly) make the IPv6 transition even more urgent (announcement).
If you're wondering why people don't follow your instructions to help you
with your project, go hit your local library and check out a cookbook. Bake
something you've never baked before. Then, while eating it, open your
documentation again and take a look at it with this in mind.
-- Mel
Chua
FOSDEM is held February 5-6 in Brussels, Belgium (LWN coverage: Freedom Box, Distribution collaboration, and Configuration management).
Eben Moglen announces the FreedomBox Foundation as part of his
FOSDEM talk. A fundraising campaign on Kickstarter garners well over the
$60,000 goal. (LWN article).
Debian 6.0 ("Squeeze") is released (announcement, LWN pre-review).
The Ada Initiative launches to promote women in open technology and
culture (announcement, LWN coverage).
Nokia, our platform is burning.
-- Nokia CEO Stephen
Elop foreshadows the switch to Windows
Nokia drops MeeGo in favor of Windows Phone 7 (LWN blurb, Reuters
report).
GNU Guile 2.0.0 released. Guile is an implementation of the
Lisp-like Scheme language (announcement).
The MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG-LA) calls for patents essential to
VP8, as it is looking to form a patent pool to potentially shake down
implementers of the video codec used by WebM (announcement).
A Linux-based supercomputer is a contestant on Jeopardy. IBM's
"Watson" trounces two former champions (New
York Times article).
Realize that 50% of today's professional programmers have never written a
line of code that had to be compiled.
-- Casey Schaufler
Python 3.2 released (announcement).
FreeBSD 8.2 released (announcement,
release notes).
Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 9x is held in Los Angeles,
February 25-27 (LWN coverage: Unity, Hackerspaces, Distribution unfriendly projects, and Phoronix launches OpenBenchmarking).
Canonical unilaterally switches the Banshee default music store to
Ubuntu One (original
blog post,
update, and
Mark Shuttleworth's view)
Red Hat stops shipping broken-out kernel patches for RHEL 6 which
causes an uproar in the community and charges of GPL violations. It
actually happened earlier, but came to light in February. (LWN coverage: Enterprise distributions and free software and
Red Hat and the GPL; Red Hat statement).
The vendor-sec mailing list and its host are compromised (announcement, LWN coverage).
Golden rule #12: When the comments do not match the code, they probably are
both wrong.
-- Steven Rostedt
Scientific Linux 6.0 is released. (announcement).
The Yocto project and OpenEmbedded "align" both in terms of
governance and technology, which should result in less fragmentation in the
building of embedded Linux systems (announcement).
Linux 2.6.38 is released (announcement, KernelNewbies summary, and
Who wrote 2.6.38).
openSUSE 11.4 is released (announcement,
LWN review).
Linus Torvalds starts loudly complaining about the ARM kernel tree,
which leads to a large effort to
clean it all up (linux-kernel post, LWN article).
If it's some desperate cry for attention by somebody, I just wish those
people would release their own sex tapes or something, rather than drag the
Linux kernel into their sordid world.
-- Linus
Torvalds is unimpressed by the Bionic GPL violation claims
Fraudulent SSL certificates issued by UserTrust (part of Comodo) are
found in the wild (LWN blurb, article and follow-up).
Android's Bionic C library comes under fire for alleged GPL
violations, though it appears to be a concerted fear, uncertainty, and
doubt (FUD) campaign (LWN article).
Microsoft sues Barnes & Noble over alleged patent infringement in
the Android-based Nook ebook
reader (LWN blurb and article).
The worst part about Comodo's letter to the public was how they claimed
that they never thought a nation state would attack them. If that's not
part of your threat model, what business do you have being part of Internet
infrastructure?
-- Dave
Aitel
Firefox 4 is released, marking the beginning of Mozilla's new
quarterly release schedule (announcement).
Google chooses not to release its tablet-oriented Android 3.0
("Honeycomb") source
code, because it isn't ready for both tablets and handsets (LWN article).
The Monotone distributed version control system releases its 1.0
version (announcement).
GCC 4.6.0 is released (LWN blurb, release notes).
Texas Linux Fest is held April 2 in Austin (LWN articles: HeliOS and The
mobile ecosystem).
Mozilla reabsorbs Mozilla Messaging, which makes the Thunderbird
email client, after spinning it off in 2007 (announcement).
Camp KDE is held in San Francisco April 4-5 (LWN coverage: Qt open governance, Using Slackware to investigate KDE 4, and Geolocation).
The Linux Filesystem, Storage, and Memory Management Summit is held
April 4-5 in San Francisco (LWN coverage: Future storage technologies and Linux plenary
session, the rest of Day
1, and Day 2).
The Yocto Project releases version 1.0 of the embedded distribution
builder (announcement, release
notes).
But when evaluating replacement models for the CA system, the very first
question we should ask is "who do I have to trust, and for how long?" If
the answer is "a prescribed set of people, forever" we should probably
proceed with extreme caution.
-- Moxie
Marlinspike
GNOME 3.0 is released (press
release, release announcement, Grumpy Editor review).
LLVM 2.9 is released as the last in the 2.x series from the compiler and
toolchain project. (announcement, release
notes).
The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is held April 6-8 in San
Francisco (LWN coverage: Linux penetration,
Yocto, and hardware success stories, Kernel
panel, Project Harmony, and Building the kernel with Clang).
core_internal_state__do_not_mess_with_it is clear enough, annoying to type
and easy to grep for. Offenders will be tracked down and slapped with
stinking trouts.
-- Thomas
Gleixner
Pamela Jones announces the end of Groklaw, which is supposed to
happen May 16, though, instead of shutting down, Mark Webbink takes over
(LWN blurb).
CyanogenMod 7.0 is released bringing Android 2.3.3 ("Gingerbread")
to the alternative firmware for mobile devices (announcement,
LWN Grumpy Editor review).
The Embedded Linux Conference is held April 10-12 in the second week
of multiple conferences held at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco (LWN
coverage: Linaro power management work and A PREEMPT_RT roadmap).
Stefano Zacchiroli is re-elected as Debian project leader in an
uncontested election (announcement).
The MySQL Conference & Expo is held April 11-14 in Santa Clara,
California, and covers much more than just MySQL (LWN article).
The first Android Builders Summit is held April 13-14 in San
Francisco (LWN coverage: Android beyond the
phone and The guts of Android
That doesn't mean that we have to accept patches mangled by using an IDE
designed for Java, and which lack test cases. However, we can be nice about
it.
-- Josh Berkus
FVWM releases version 2.6 after nearly 10 years of development on
the window manager (announcement, LWN review).
Oracle announces that OpenOffice.org will become a "community-based
project", which is the start of the move to Apache (press
release).
The US Department of Justice announces a change to Novell's patent sale
to CPTN Holdings (owned by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and EMC), which is
aimed at allowing free software
implementations of things covered by those patents (press
release).
Google falls prey to the patent troll Bedrock Technologies for the
Linux routing table implementation based on a
1997 patent on what is essentially open hashing (LWN article).
LWN offers a "maniacal supporter" subscription level for those who
would like to pay $50/month—a surprising number of folks signed up at
that level, but we can always use more ... (announcement).
WebM announces a cross-license initiative that is meant to operate
as a kind of patent pool for users and developers of the video format (announcement).
Slackware 13.37 is released (announcement, LWN review).
Ubuntu 11.04 ("Natty Narwhal") is released with Unity as its default
shell (announcement, press
release).
LinuxFest Northwest is held in Bellingham, Washington on April 30
and May 1 (LWN coverage: Getting HTTPS
everywhere).
OpenBSD 4.9 is released (announcement, list of changes).
Most developers have only the vaguest idea of what the security
implications of symlinks are, and simply saying "this seems a tad too
restrictive" does not instill confidence that you've spent the time to
become an expert on this obscure and complicated subject.
-- Matt
Mackall
Mozilla refuses a request from the US Department of Homeland Security to remove an
add-on, which routes around domain seizures made by the agency,
because there is no court order to do so (blog
posting).
The Ubuntu Developer Summit is held in Budapest, Hungary May 9-13
along with the Linaro Development Summit (LWN coverage: UDS keynotes, Mark
Shuttleworth interview, ARM platform
consolidation (from LDS), UDS security
discussions, LTTng in the Ubuntu
kernel, and Linaro keynotes).
The Netherlands Unix Users Group (NLUUG) Spring conference is held May
12 in Ede (LWN article: Open telephony).
The Libre Graphics meeting is held May 10-13 in Montreal, Canada
(LWN articles: Krita talks and Adaptable GIMP).
I'll call it Josselin's law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the
probability of a comparison involving Ulrich Drepper approaches 1.".
-- Lennart Poettering
The LyX document processor releases version 2.0 (announcement, LWN pre-review).
Perl 5.14.0 is released (announcement, perldelta
details).
Linux 2.6.39 is released (announcement, KernelNewbies summary, development statistics).
Miguel de Icaza announces the formation of Xamarin to create Mono-based
products for
Android and iOS after the Mono team is laid off by Attachmate as part of the
Novell acquisition (announcement).
Former Red Hat general counsel Mark Webbink officially takes over
Groklaw (announcement,
parting interview
with Pamela Jones at The H).
I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living
personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call
"intellectual property." I don't regard my expression as a form of
property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don't have
it, somebody else does.
-- EFF co-founder John
Perry Barlow
PGCon, the PostgreSQL conference, is held in Ottawa, Canada May
19-20 (LWN article).
Linus Torvalds starts considering a kernel version number change,
which eventually results in 3.0 instead of 2.6.40 (lkml posting).
Fedora 15 is released (announcement,
feature
list).
MeeGo 1.2 is released in what turns out to be the last major
MeeGo release (announcement).
The MeeGo conference is held in San Francisco May 23-25, presumably
the last of those as well (LWN coverage: MeeGo's openness and transparency and MeeGo 1.2 on the N900).
Linux Mint 11 is released (announcement, LWN review).
openSUSE renames the openSUSE Build Service to the Open Build
Service, changing the focus a bit while preserving the OBS acronym (announcement).
LinuxCon Japan is held in Yokohama June 1-3 (LWN coverage: A conversation with Linus and Android, forking, and control).
Unfortunately, there is a problem with Free Software developers, firstly -
they often don't wear suits, and (get this) some have beards: which just
shows you the kind of schmucks they are. But worse - they have odd,
meritocratic, collaborative decision making processes, that don't come up
with suitably corporate answers.
-- Michael Meeks
LibreOffice 3.4.0 is released (announcement,
release
notes, Michael
Meeks's look
at the cleanups that went into 3.4.0).
Mageia 1, the community-driven fork of Mandriva, is released (announcement, release notes).
Ubuntu's first long-term support release, 6.06 ("Dapper Drake") reaches
its end of life (announcement).
Bugs are like mushrooms - found one, look around for more...
-- Al Viro
Oracle starts the process of donating OpenOffice.org to the Apache
Software Foundation (LWN
blurb and article).
The venerable Kermit serial communications program is finally released as
free software under a BSD license (LWN article).
Karen Sandler is named as the new GNOME Foundation executive
director, succeeding Stormy Peters (announcement,
LWN interview with Sandler).
Bitcoin raises untested legal concerns related to securities law, the Stamp
Payments Act, tax evasion, consumer protection and money laundering, among
others. And that's just in the U.S. While EFF is often the defender of
people ensnared in legal issues arising from new technologies, we try very
hard to keep EFF from becoming the actual subject of those fights or
issues.
-- EFF stops
accepting Bitcoins
Mozilla releases Firefox 5 (announcement).
AVM vs. Cybits case heard in Berlin, Germany, which is an important
test of the GPL for embedded devices running Linux. A decision will have to
wait until November (Free Software Foundation Europe press
release, Harald Welte's blog
post).
Nokia releases the MeeGo-ish N9 handset (LWN blurb and article).
GNU Awk (Gawk) 4.0 is released (announcement,
LWN review).
A backdoor is found in the vsftpd source code (LWN blurb).
Most well-adjusted people would not stand up in a crowd of people and start
calling people around them idiots. Just because there is a monitor and a
network cable separating you from the crowd doesn't make it ok, and I am
tired of it.
-- Rasmus Lerdorf
CERN releases version 1.1 of its Open Hardware
License (announcement).
Project Harmony releases version 1.0 of its contributor agreements
(LWN blurb, agreements).
Nortel sells a huge pile of patents covering networking and lots
more to a consortium made up of Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research
In Motion, and Sony. Google also unsuccessfully bid on the patents (Reuters
article).
The VLC media player reports that companies are bundling it with
adware/spyware, which is an increasing problem for free software
projects (announcement,
LWN article).
I am quite at ease not participating in netfilter/iptables anymore while
the discussion about IPv6 NAT becomes an issue again: I always indicated
"over my dead body", and now that I am no longer in charge, nobody will
have to kill me ;)
-- Harald Welte
CentOS 6.0 is released, eight months after RHEL 6 (announcement, release
notes).
The realtime kernel tree moves to 3.0 after being based on 2.6.33
for a long time (3.0-rc7-rt0
announcement).
IBM promises to contribute the Symphony fork of OpenOffice.org (OOo) to the Apache
OOo project (announcement).
Oracle acquires Ksplice, Inc., makers of the ksplice no-reboot
kernel patching product (announcement,
LWN article: Ksplice and CentOS).
As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features
or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it's simply a
way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of
Linux.
-- Linus Torvalds announces
3.0
Linux 3.0 is released without any major changes that some might
assume come with the move from 2.6.x (announcement, KernelNewbies summary, and
Who wrote 3.0).
Mozilla announces the "Boot to Gecko" standalone operating system,
which is based on Linux (announcement,
LWN coverage).
Several versions of Emacs ship without all of the source code, which
does not comply with the GPL, though the FSF itself is not violating the
license (LWN coverage).
The digiKam software collection 2.0.0 is released; digiKam SC is a
photo editor and related tools (announcement, LWN review).
KDE Software Compilation 4.7 is released (announcement).
DebConf 2011 is held July 24-30 in Banja Luka, Bosnia and
Herzegovina (Final
report [PDF]).
The second Desktop Summit is held in Berlin, Germany, August 6-12;
it is a combination of GNOME's GUADEC and KDE's Akademy conferences (LWN
coverage: Companies and open source,
Copyright assignments, Desktop crypto consolidation, Service design, Plasma Active).
Every time I get frustrated with doing paperwork, I simply imagine having
the job of estimating how much time it takes to do paperwork, and I feel
better immediately.
-- Valerie
Aurora
Samba 3.6.0 is released (announcement).
Debian celebrates its 18th birthday, just two years younger than
Linux itself (announcement).
Google announces its intent to acquire Motorola Mobility
mostly for its patents it would seem (announcement).
The first release candidate of the Mozilla Public License 2.0 is
released (announcement,
an LWN look at the update process).
But if you want to be taken seriously as a researcher, you should
publish your code! Without publication of your *code* research in your
area cannot be reproduced by others, so it is not science.
-- Guido van Rossum
LinuxCon North America is held August 17-19 in Vancouver, Canada
and celebrates 20 years of Linux (LWN coverage: Clay Shirky on
collaboration, Largest desktop Linux
deployment, FreedomBox, x86 platform drivers, MeeGo architecture update, ConnMan, and Mobile
Linux patent landscape).
COSCUP 2011 is held in Taipei, Taiwan August 20-21 (LWN coverage: Year of the Linux tablet?).
A serious denial-of-service attack against Apache web servers is seen in
the wild (announcement, LWN coverage).
HP announces it is dropping its webOS devices (press
release).
The 20th anniversary of the first Linux post is August 25; the
now-famous "just a hobby" post
to comp.os.minix.
The Certificate Authority system as it stands today is a house of cards and
we're witnessing in public what many have known for years in private. The
entire system is soaked in petrol and waiting for a light.
-- Jacob
Appelbaum
DigiNotar issues fraudulent SSL/TLS certificates for several domains
including google.com in July, but it is discovered in August (LWN blurb and coverage).
The kernel.org server is found to be compromised; the compromise
affects various Linux
Foundation servers as well; it will take some time for things to get back
to normal. (LWN coverage)
Mandriva 2011 ("Hydrogen") is released (announcement,
release notes).
The Linux Plumbers Conference is held in Santa Rosa, California,
September 7-9 (LWN coverage: Development model
diversity, Booting and systemd, Making the net go faster, Coping with hardware diversity, Bufferbloat update, and Control groups).
No developer ever thinks their change is going to break anything for
anyone. It's the QA Law of What Could Possibly Go Wrong.
-- Adam Williamson
The Linux Security Summit is held with Plumbers (LWN coverage: LSM roundtable and Kernel hardening roundtable).
PostgreSQL 9.1 is released (announcement, LWN article).
The Qt Project is announced for more open governance of the free
software UI toolkit (announcement).
Coherent vision isn't something that the kernel community really values.
-- Neil Brown
The openSUSE conference is held in Nürnberg, Germany September
11-14 (Conference
wrap-up).
The OpenShot video editor releases version 1.4 (announcement).
UEFI "secure boot" and Microsoft's mandate of it for Windows 8 hardware
starts
to concern free operating system developers (Matthew Garrett blog posts:
Part 1, Part 2; LWN article).
Not spending as much time sitting in meetings and fighting with other
vendors is one of the competitive advantages PostgreSQL development has
vs. the "big guys". There needs to be a pretty serious problem with your
process before adding bureaucracy to it is anything but a backwards
move. And standardization tends to attract lots of paperwork. Last thing
you want to be competing with a big company on is doing that sort of big
company work.
-- Greg Smith
GNOME 3.2 is released (announcement,
release notes).
PulseAudio 1.0 is released (announcement, release notes).
Tizen, the successor to MeeGo, is announced, which incorporates
technology from the LiMo project; the announcement comes less than a month
after Intel says it is "fully committed" to MeeGo (announcement, LWN coverage).
The Berlios code repository announces that it will shut down at the
end of the year (announcement,
LWN coverage).
Red Hat acquires Gluster, the makers of the
open source GlusterFS
(press
release).
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).
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).
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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