2003 Linux Timeline: May

[Posted December 16, 2003 by corbet]

We will be happy to show the evidence we have at the appropriate time in a court setting. The Linux community would have me publish it now, (so they can have it) laundered by the time we can get to a court hearing. That's not the way we're going to go.

--SCO CEO Darl McBride

Ingo Molnar's exec shield patch is posted, providing some protection from buffer overflow attacks (patch).

Groklaw launches and becomes the definitive site for SCO case coverage (site).

SCO suspends Linux shipments and begins threatening users (press release, letter to users).

GNU Ghostscript 7.07 is released; this is the final GNU Ghostscript release as a result of disagreements between the FSF and artofcode LLC (announcement).

The $1 billion in damages and future royalties SCO is seeking won't put a mere dent in the Linux movement: "That's a cost that gets lost in the rounding," says [SCO lawyer David] Boies, adding, "The cost efficiency of Linux won't rise or fall."

--Forbes

GCC 3.3 is released (changelog).

Microsoft buys an SCO Unix license (press release).

The World Wide Web Consortium approves its new patent policy which calls for royalty-free licensing, but which allows field-of-use restrictions (press release).

Novell states that it never transferred its Unix copyrights to SCO, but later backs down.

[MySQL] MySQL AB acquires the rights to SAP DB which will be provided under the GPL as a complement to MySQL (press release).

LinuxTag e.V. files an unfair competition complaint against SCO in Germany, which eventually succeeds in muzzling the company's claims there (press release).

Linux is like a puppy--in the beginning it's great, but you also have to take care of it

--Sun VP Jonathan Schwartz

Frustration with 2.4 kernel development grows after a full six months pass without a 2.4 release.

The city of Munich switches to Linux; the move involves 14,000 systems, and comes despite intense opposition by Microsoft (IBM press release).

New Internet Computer shuts down; NIC was Larry Ellison's attempt at selling Linux-based thin clients.

Quite frankly, I found it mostly interesting in a Jerry Springer kind of way. White trash battling it out in public, throwing chairs at each other. SCO crying about IBM's other women. ... Fairly entertaining.

--Linus Torvalds

The SCO Group reports its first quarterly profit, thanks to SCOsource payments from Microsoft and Sun.

Linus Torvalds releases sparse, his static checking tool for finding some kinds of kernel bugs (announcement).

A Linux-based supercomputer is made from Sony PlayStations by researchers at the University of Chicago.

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