2006 Linux and free software timeline: January

[Posted December 19, 2006 by corbet]

We get in the situation where lots of people are sitting there with arms folded, complaining about lack of a new kernel release while nobody is actually working on the bugs. Nobody knows why this happens.

-- Andrew Morton

Novell posts its Xgl code bringing this work out from behind closed doors (announcement).

Linus releases 2.6.15, fifteen years to the day after he bought the machine he first developed Linux on (announcement).

The Free Software Foundation announces Gnash, intended to be a free Flash media player. Someday. (Announcement).

Coverity receives a grant to perform audits of free software from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Another banner year has passed, with Linux once again proving its superiority in the area of crappy wireless (WiFi) support. Linux oldsters love the current state of wireless, because it hearkens back to the heady days of Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik and Linux kernel 0.99, when getting hardware to work under Linux required either engineering knowledge or luck (or both).

-- Jeff Garzik

John Linville takes over the Linux wireless stack, bringing a new level of energy to Linux 802.11 development.

CERT releases its 2005 vulnerabilities list which purports to show that "Unix/Linux" has three times as many vulnerabilities as Windows (list, snide LWN response).

Novell releases AppArmor under the GPL (press release).

Mono is added to Fedora Core thanks to a promise of protection from the Open Invention Network.

Microsoft's FAT filesystem patents are upheld - for a while (article).

The Linux kernel is under the GPL version 2. Not anything else. Some individual files are licenceable under v3, but not the kernel in general. And quite frankly, I don't see that changing.

-- Linus Torvalds

The first GPLv3 draft is released (LWN analysis).

The "Digital Content Protection Act" enters the U.S. Congress; among other things, it would have enshrined "customary historic use" of media, giving a veto power over any new technologies (article).

The ghost of software patents begins to stir in Europe, though, by the end of the year, it remains just a ghost.

Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell wins the 2005 Free Software Award (announcement).

The Rockbox iPod port produces audio (announcement).

OSDL accepts a set of proposals from the kernel development community on how it can better serve that community (proposals). [Seamonkey]

SeaMonkey 1.0 is released, keeping the old Mozilla suite alive (info page).

The ReactOS project suspends development for a code audit among fears of contamination from proprietary code (announcement).

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February ==>