2003 Linux Timeline: August

[Posted December 16, 2003 by corbet]

I must say that your decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux.

Novell acquires Ximian (press release).

Red Hat files suit against SCO asking for a judgment that its products do not infringe on SCO's intellectual property (press release, complaint). [Gentoo]

Gentoo Linux 1.4 is released.

SCO announces the availability of its "intellectual property license for Linux" (press release). Nobody has managed to buy one yet, though.

The UCITA committee is shut down by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (announcement).

I think you guys who care should have a huge free-for-all, an electronic mud-wrestling thing if you will. But not on linux-kernel.

--Linus gets tired of spelling flames

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 achieves Common Criteria EAL2 certification; it is the first Linux distribution to be certified in this way (press release).

The Eridani Linux distribution is shut down (announcement).

A German study shows that Linux is almost as usable as Windows (ComputerWorld coverage).

RealNetworks launches the Helix Player project to build a free media player based on Real's code (announcement).

Every party who enters into this license will be in violation of the GPL, and in infringement of the collective copyrights of the Linux and GNU system authors. As a customer, if you purchase the SCO license, you can be sued by every copyright holder who has contributed to the Linux kernel and other components of the system. You can be sued by IBM, by Red Hat, by me, by tens of thousands of people and companies.

--Bruce Perens talks tough

OPIE (Open Palmtop Integrated Environment) 1.0 is released (announcement).

Sun Microsystems joins the Open Source Development Lab (press release).

IBM countersues SCO, alleging GPL and patent violations among many other things (analysis).

The GNU Project's FTP server is compromised (explanation). [Debian]

The Debian Project celebrates its tenth birthday (announcement).

The Xouvert project launches as an experimental fork of XFree86.

A few years ago I'd have worried about doing this, the great thing is that with the kernel community we have today I know I'm not a critical cog in the machine. In fact I'm surrounded by people far better than I am and we even have Andrew Morton to keep Linus in check.

--Alan Cox goes back to school

SCO claims that the GPL is unenforceable because it is preempted by Federal copyright law, which only allows the creation of a single backup copy of software.

SCO shows some code at SCOForum. It is immediately shown by the community as coming from BSD-licensed sources (though one piece does turn out to have come via SYSV).

Linux users are immune to the SoBig virus, but get flooded with "virus notification" mail anyway.

Guido van Rossum leaves PythonLabs to work with a startup company.

If you go behind the scenes, the attacks that we get that don't have IBM's name on them, underneath the covers, are sponsored by IBM.

--Darl talks weird

The California Supreme Court upholds restrictions on linking to DeCSS in the Bunner case, but sends the case back for a determination of whether DeCSS truly infringes a trade secret.

SCO claims it showed the BPF code as an example of how it can detect "obfuscated" code rather than a case of actual copying.

SCO's web site falls off the net apparently as a result of another denial of service attack.

[Postgresql] The 2.4.22 kernel is released (announcement).

PostgreSQL Inc. donates its replication software to the project (press release).

A World Intellectual Property Organization meeting on open source is canceled due to pressure from software vendors.

<== July

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2003 Linux Timeline: August

Posted Dec 17, 2003 13:00 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

Typo: Unforceable [sic] should be Unenforceable.

Darl

Posted Dec 21, 2003 6:57 UTC (Sun) by xnihilanthx (guest, #17991) [Link]

> I must say that your decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux.

...said the dinosaur