2003 Linux Timeline: December

[Posted December 16, 2003 by corbet]

We, the Free Software developers, created this software to empower everyone, and for everyone to share. But today's Enterprise Linux is a lock-in play, designed to draw the customer into expensive subscriptions and single-vendor service.

--UserLinux manifesto

Wind River joins Eclipse and OSDL after years of downplaying Linux.

Jon Johansen returns to court for the appeal of his acquittal for violation Norway's anti-circumvention law.

An end to development for the 2.4 kernel is announced by Marcelo Tosatti (announcement). After 2.4.24, only critical fixes will be considered.

An rsync.gentoo.org mirror server is compromised by an unknown attacker (alert).

The first UserLinux manifesto is posted by Bruce Perens (manifesto).

... I want to walk the Court through enough of our complaint to help the Court understand that IBM clearly did contribute a lot of the Unix-related information into Linux. We just don't know what it is.

--Kevin McBride in court.

IBM wins a motion to compel discovery in the SCO case; SCO, defended by Kevin McBride rather than David Boies, loses on every point.

SCO investors BayStar and RBC obtain veto power over any SCO action which would trigger the 20% payment to SCO's lawyers.

The Fedora Project posts a new draft leadership scheme that does away with voting and goes for the benevolent meritocracy approach (draft). [DoCoMo]

NTT DoCoMo plans to standardize on Linux handsets.

If Darl McBride was in charge, he'd probably make marriage unconstitutional too, since clearly it de-emphasizes the commercial nature of normal human interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the commercial growth of prostitution.

--Linus Torvalds

Microsoft starts selling patent licenses for the FAT filesystem, leading to concern that an anti-Linux patent offensive may be in the works.

SCO suffers from yet another set of denial of service attacks on its web site.

Novell joins the Open Source Development Labs (press release).

The GNOME Foundation elects a new board of directors, consisting of Owen Taylor, Glynn Foster, Jody Goldberg, Jeff Waugh, Luis Villa, Jonathan Blandford, Nat Friedman, Leslie Proctor, Bill Haneman, Dave Camp, and Malcolm Tredinnick (announcement).

The European Commission Open Source Observatory launches as a resource site for governmental open source usage in the EU (observatory).

The fact that [GNOME] comes with a license to develop and distribute proprietary applications is the sole reason for this decision. A long discussion on the mailing list has made it clear that GNOME and KDE are similar in technical merit and commercial acceptance at this time, leaving only the licensing issue as a basis for this decision.

--Bruce Perens makes his choice

GNOME hacker Ettore Perazzoli dies.

The Australian Capital Territory passes a law requiring that open source software be considered in governmental purchases.

MandrakeSoft announces decreasing losses and increasing margins for its 2002/2003 fiscal year (shareholder newsletter).

UserLinux decides to standardize on GNOME and exclude KDE as a way of simplifying maintenance (Bruce's explanation).

Immunix Secure OS 7.3 is released promising Red Hat Linux-compatible updates through March, 2005 (announcement).

SSC threatens LinuxGazette.net with a trademark action and tries to have the domain name reassigned.

No, none of the code in the Linux ABI modules contains SCO IP. This code is under the GPL and it re-implements publicly documented interfaces. We do not have an issue with the Linux ABI modules.

--SCO's Blake Stowell, February 2003

End users have a choice. They can go back to using Linux based on the 2.2 kernel which includes no infringing code, or they can continue using SCO's UNIX code as it is being found in Linux and properly compensate the company for using it.

--Blake Stowell, October 2003

White Box Enterprise Linux 3.0 is released (announcement); White Box is a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with trademarks and such removed.

The 2.6.0 kernel is released (announcement).

Jon Johansen is acquitted, again, in Norway.

SCO claims that the "Unix ABI" is its property and names several Linux files it says are infringing; these include error codes and signal numbers, and have been in the kernel since well before 2.2 (SCO letter).

Novell reasserts its claim to the Unix source copyrights (press release).

Red Hat acquires Sistina and reports a $4 million profit.

The XFree86 Core Team disbands (announcement).

<== November

Timeline home

2003 Linux Timeline: December

Posted Dec 17, 2003 16:10 UTC (Wed) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (4 responses)

Not to pick on Bruce, but I vote for the final immortal quote to be something about qt
being a problem, because it's GPL:-) After all, it is a historic turn of events that
someone would ever say such a thing!

henrik

2003 Linux Timeline: December

Posted Dec 17, 2003 18:28 UTC (Wed) by lovelace (guest, #278) [Link] (3 responses)

Seconded. I couldn't believe he was actually saying that when I read it. I mean, isn't the GPL
supposed to protect the users rights more than any other "free" license? Why call it
"UserLinux" if what you're actually worrying about is companies' ability to write non-free
programs?

qt license

Posted Dec 17, 2003 20:47 UTC (Wed) by ken_i_m (guest, #4938) [Link] (2 responses)

Better re-read the licensing the code is released under.

http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/freelicense.html

"The Free Edition licenses do not allow the development or distribution of commercial software."

http://www.newsforge.com/software/03/12/16/0029234.shtml

"It is possible for us to make our system entirely royalty-free for solution developers, both Free and proprietary. This dictates some software choices: GNOME and PostgreSQL rather than KDE and MySQL, simply because of the way those products license proprietary developers."

As Bruce points out KDE is not the only project that does not have extra strings attached when it comes to proprietary developers. Additionally, KDE and MySQL are not the only projects with such strings. They are just two of the better known ones. The moral here is to read the fine print of the licensing attached to any and all code. Parse the wording thoroughly as they may well only tell you once.

UserLinux is the thin edge of the wedge to drive FOSS into the corporate desktop market. As such it is trying to gain a foothold in an environment where the ideals of FOSS are not just alien but viewed as hostile to their worldview of "self-interested market players".

cheers,
ken

qt license is QPL or GPL, your choice

Posted Dec 18, 2003 1:39 UTC (Thu) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]

> http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/freelicense.html
> "The Free Edition licenses do not allow the development or
> distribution of commercial software."

That web page is incorrect. (And not just because it calls the GPL the "GNU Public License".)

The Qt libraries are available under the recipient's choice of the QPL or the GNU GPL. Software licensed under the GNU General Public License can be used and included and distributed in commercial software; it explicitly allows this. What it does not allow is the restriction of users' freedoms beyond the existing restrictions in the GNU GPL.

The fact that the author of the above web page doesn't know the difference between "commercial" and "proprietary" does not change the terms of the GNU GPL under which Trolltech have released their software.

qt license

Posted Dec 18, 2003 8:34 UTC (Thu) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Yes yes. I was not trying to imply, that Bruce's decision is completely illogical and
laughable. Having a proprietary-friendly Linux is ok with me, and GPL'd libraries is a
problem if you want to take that route.

I'm just saying, that when put in perspective, this development is truly historical. I mean
a quote like that would also encompass the historical facts of Qt once not being GPL,
all the arguments about that, leading to the birth of Gnome in the first place, a lot of
other things (some too nasty to mention here), and then the release of Qt as GPL. We
have gone thru all these things together, and now someone says that Qt is a problem
because it's GPL. In the short history of Linux, one could almost classify "the story
about the gnus and the trolls" as one of epical (is that a correct transformation of the
word epic?) magnitudes.

(And additionally we should not forget the fact, that Bruce being the person saying this
thing, put's some irony into the story. The greeks have Oidipus, we have Qt. Hmm...
perhaps that's not a good comparison, I don't see this as a tragedy. Forget that, it
doesn't fit.)

henrik

2003 Linux Timeline: Mandrake revival

Posted Dec 26, 2003 1:14 UTC (Fri) by stock (guest, #5849) [Link]

In januari Mandrake had its lips in the water, today they are
financial ok again, and have the best Linux Desktop offering IMHO.

Chapeaux Mandrake!