2011 Linux and free software timeline

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.

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 Napierała, 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).

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).

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).

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).

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 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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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.

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).