2012 Linux and free software timeline

By Michael Kerrisk
February 21, 2013

Here is LWN's fifteenth annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world.

2012 has largely been business as usual. Software and distributions continue to be released at an astonishing rate; some distributions have risen in popularity as others fall. Linux continues to appear in more and more places, from embedded to high-performance computing. And, though Linux still has not conquered the desktop, it (in the form of Android) seems to have conquered the phone market and to be well established on tablets. The usual threats to free software continue to lurk: patents and technological measures such as UEFI secure boot. Nevertheless, it has been another good year for Linux, and the prospects for the coming year(s) seem bright.

This is version 1.0 of the 2012 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 14 timelines and some other retrospective articles going all the way back to 1998.

January
February
March

April
May
June

July
August
September

October
November
December

January

Weighing all that up, I don't think it is useful to set our goal on "getting Android to use a mainline kernel" - that isn't going to happen. Rather we should focus primarily on "making it *possible* to run android user-space on mainline".

-- Neil Brown

Linux 3.2 is released (announcement, KernelNewbies summary, LWN merge window summaries: part 1 and part 2).

The Apache Software Foundation releases Hadoop 1.0 (announcement, LWN article).

Microsoft confirms earlier fears about UEFI secure boot by requiring vendors to lock down ARM devices (LWN blurb).

Scribus 1.4 is released (announcement, LWN article).

So, I've said it many times before, and I'll say it again:

Yes, you are special and unique, just like everyone else.

The next person who says the "embedded is different" phrase again, owes me a beer of my choice.

-- Greg Kroah-Hartman

After nearly two years' work, the Mozilla Project releases the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (announcement, license text).

The Tizen project releases a set of source repositories and an alpha SDK (LWN article).

systemd v38 is released; this is the first release containing "the journal" (announce,ment).

NSA releases security-enhanced Android (LWN blurb). [lca2012 skydome logo]

linux.conf.au is held in Ballarat, Australia, January 16-21 (LWN coverage: A Samba 4 update; Addressing the failure of open source; The past, present, and future of Ubuntu on ARM; Jacob Appelbaum on surveillance and censorship; An LCA 2012 summary; videos).

Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 10x is held in Los Angeles, January 20-22 (LWN coverage: Robots rampage; The trickiness of the education market; The road ahead for automotive Linux and open source).

One always got the feeling that somebody was steering GNOME, but it wasn't clear who. When it started, I thought it was Miguel and Nat, then Novell, then Redhat. Now it has that floaty, determined meandering that the best mass open source projects have. From a distance, everyone seems to be constantly bickering and regretting the next steps; but the steps get made, and slowly everyone adapts to them. GNOME feels like a nation now.

-- Danny O'Brien

FreeBSD 9.0 is released (announcement, release notes).

An X.Org Server flaw that allows screen-lock programs to be bypassed is disclosed; the bug is quickly fixed (LWN coverage).

GDB 7.4 is released (release announcement).

The KDE project releases KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and KDE Platform 4.8 (LWN blurb, announcement).

HP announces a roadmap to make webOS open source by September (LWN blurb, announcement).

Cinnamon 1.2 is released; this is the first stable release of Linux Mint's fork of the GNOME Shell (LWN article).

February

I really urge people to think about openness and freedom, two amazingly important concepts, beyond the boundaries of simple software licensing. Licensing is important, and we take it pretty damn seriously .. but we ought to look at bigger picture and really think about how to make our digital tools open and free in all sorts of ways.

-- Aaron Seigo

Greg Kroah-Hartman moves to the Linux Foundation (LWN blurb).

ownCloud 3 is released; LWN looked at this personal cloud system in January.

Linaro Connect Q1.12 is held in Redwood City, California, February 6-10 (LWN coverage of the scheduling minisummit).

FOSDEM '12 is held in Brussels, Belgium, February 4-5 (LWN coverage: Multiarch on Debian and Ubuntu; The Wayland display server).

The Document Foundation announces that it will be based in Berlin (announcement).

Canonical ceases sponsoring one of their employees to work full-time on the Kubuntu project (announcement).

The book Open Advice is published under a CC-BY-SA license; the book consists of a set of essays with advice on contributing to FOSS projects (LWN review).

SUSE, the oldest of the current commercial Linux distributions, turns 20 this year (IT World article, TechWeek Europe article).

Robyn Bergeron becomes the new leader of the Fedora Project, succeeding Jared Smith (LWN interview with Robyn).

LibreOffice 3.5 makes its third stable release, with the project starting to settle into a 6-month release cycle (announcement; LWN article).

Wayland protocol and Weston compositor 0.85.0 are released (announcement, LWN article; The H article).

The Android Builders Summit is held in Redwood Shores, California, February 13-14 (LWN coverage: Android and the kernel mainline).

Fellow Anti-mergers, I understand the pain and anguish that systemd has caused you personally, and your families. Your hopes and dreams crushed, by someone with all the charm of a cheese grater across the knuckles. Your remaining life tainted by this putrescent subhuman who forced himself upon your internet.

Despite the privation we have all endured, please find strength to stop this nightmarish ravaging of our once-pure filesystems. For if he's not stopped now, what hope for /usr/sbin vs /usr/bin?

-- Rusty Russell

Canonical announces Ubuntu for Android (LWN article).

VLC 2.0 is released (LWN blurb).

Adobe ends separate distribution of its proprietary Linux Flash plugin used by the Firefox browser (LWN blurb and later article on Flash support on Linux). [Mozilla logo]

Mozilla announces a deal to start shipping HTML5-driven smartphones by the end of 2012 (announcement, LWN article).

The proposed /usr unification causes gnashing of teeth in some quarters (LWN article).

MINIX 3.2.0 is released (LWN article).

March

Buying DRMed books is voting with your wallet for a system that criminalizes those that insist on living in freedom and will screw us all in the long run when DRM is the only choice we are offered and removing the DRM is difficult, unsafe, and illegal.

-- Benjamin Mako Hill

PHP 5.4.0 is released (LWN blurb; announcement).

The GitHub repository site is compromised (LWN blurb).

Wine 1.4 is released (announcement).

Vagrant 1.0 is released (LWN article).

X.Org Server 1.12 is released (LWN article on the XInput multitouch extension in that release).

The Open Invention Network announces an expansion of the range of software that is covered by the group's patent license agreement. (LWN article).

Google releases the LinSched scheduler-testing framework (release announcement, LWN article).

Programming is not just an act of telling a computer what to do: it is also an act of telling other programmers what you wished the computer to do. Both are important, and the latter deserves care.

-- Andrew Morton

bzr 2.5.0 is released (announcement).

Gnuplot 4.6 is released (announcement).

Cinnamon 1.4 is released (LWN blurb).

Crossroads I/O 1.0.0 is released (LWN article on this ZeroMQ fork).

The Mozilla project decides to support the H.264 video codec (LWN blurb and article).

Patch verification occurs in an artificial bubble of software run/known by kernel developers. It can take years before the code is exposed to real life situations.

-- Christoph Lameter

Linux 3.3 is released (announcement; KernelNewbies summary; LWN merge window summaries part 1 and part 2; LWN development statistics article).

GCC 4.7.0 is released; the project is now 25 years old (announcement).

LTTng 2.0 "stable" is released (LWN coverage: part 1 and part 2).

Current trends are: for every 1000 patches sent there's maybe one patch that has a tad too much information in its changelog - but instead offers good entertainment in the changelog so it's still perfectly fine. 990 patches have too little information. The remaining 9 are just fine.

-- Ingo Molnar

The GNU C library steering committee dissolves itself, one of several events that signal a change in the governance of the project (LWN blurb and article).

Version 1 of the Go programming language is released (LWN blurb). [Gopher (Go logo)]

GNOME 3.4 is released; this is the second major update of GNOME 3 (announcement).

April

The 2012 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory Management Summit is held in San Francisco, April 1-2 (LWN coverage: day 1 and day 2).

Debian joins the Open Source Initiative as an affiliate (announcement).

The udev maintainer announces that the udev and systemd projects will merge, noting that it will still be possible to run udev on a system that is not using systemd (announcement).

I think one of the things that makes Debian off-putting and unwelcoming is that we're a little *too* obsessed with criticizing everyone's ideas, and what some people see as "healthy discussion" other people see as "hurtful flamewars over bike shed colors."

-- Russ Allbery

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby language, wins the 2011 Free Software Foundation award for the advancement of free software (announcement).

Red Hat celebrates becoming the first open source company to turn over one billion dollars in a fiscal year with a US$100,000 donation to open source projects (LWN blurb).

The Kubuntu project acquires a new sponsor, as Blue Systems hires two former Kubuntu developers away from Canonical (LWN blurb and article).

The 2012 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit take place in San Francisco, April 3-5 (LWN coverage: Trademarks for free software projects; The kernel panel; X and Wayland; The Linux System Definition; The future of GLIBC; LLVM and Linux).

We don't need a system to help us ignore bug reports; our existing process handles that with admirable efficiency.

-- Robert Haas

Maintenance of the Linux 2.4 kernel comes to an end, eight years after the release of Linux 2.6.0 (announcement).

PostGIS 2.0.0 is released (announcement).

The Samba team announce a fix for a remote code execution vulnerability (LWN blurb).

The 2012 Linux Audio Conference takes place in Palo Alto, California, April 12-15 (LWN coverage).

Stefano Zacchiroli is re-elected for a third term as leader of the Debian Project (announcement).

A couple of times I've said "It looks like you could use some help. Would you like me to co-maintain with you?" and have generally gotten a positive response. If it's put in terms of "Looks like you're busy, I can help" and not "You suck and should be fired so I can take over" people seem to be pretty open to it.

-- Scott Kitterman

MythTV 0.25 is released (LWN article).

FreeBSD 8.3 is released (announcement, release notes).

Calligra 2.4 is released (LWN blurb and article).

Nathan Willis joins LWN as an editor (LWN article).

gitolite v3.0 is released (announcement). [OpenSSH logo]

OpenSSH 6.0 released (announcement).

May

Geary 0.1 is released (LWN article on this GNOME-based email client).

The Defensive Patent License is released (LWN article).

OpenBSD 5.1 is released (announcement).

An Apple programmer, apparently by accident, left a debug flag in the most recent version of the Mac OS X operating system. In specific configurations, applying OS X Lion update 10.7.3 turns on a system-wide debug log file that contains the login passwords of every user who has logged in since the update was applied. The passwords are stored in clear text.

-- Emil Protalinski

The Tizen project announces the 1.0 ("Larkspur") release of its SDK and platform source code (LWN blurb and article). [Ubuntu logo]

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" released (announcement).

Yocto Project 1.2 is released (announcement). [Xfce logo]

Xfce 4.10 is released (LWN blurb).

The Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 is held in Austria, Vienna, May 2-5 (LWN coverage: Inkscape quietly evolves into a development platform; GIMP's new release, new über-core, and future; Unusual typography).

The inaugural Tizen conference takes place in San Francisco, 7-9 May (LWN coverage: Pitching HTML5 as a development framework).

Dell announces Project Sputnik, which is aimed at creating a commercial, Linux-based developer laptop (LWN blurb). [Apache OpenOffice logo]

Apache OpenOffice 3.4 is released (LWN blurb, pointer to an earlier timeline of the work on the project, and an earlier article looking at progress of the project).

The GNU nPth project makes a first release of its GNU portable threads library (announcement).

Open Build Service version 2.3 released (announcement).

GIMP 2.8 is released (release notes, LWN blurb and article previewing the release). [GIMP logo]

The Document Foundation announces a certification program "to foster the provision of professional services around LibreOffice" (announcement).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux turns 10 (press release).

Enough data has come in to satisfy me that with all the improvements in Linux over the last year, and with BQL, codel and fq_codel, that we've won a major battle in the war against bufferbloat

-- Dave Täht

ConnMan 1.0 is released (LWN blurb).

Kdenlive 0.9 is released (announcement).

PowerTOP v2.0 is released (LWN blurb).

PulseAudio 2.0 is released (announcement).

PGCon 2012 is held in Ottawa, Canada, May 17-18 (LWN coverage).

Mandriva SA announces it will return control of the distribution back "to the community". However, the Mageia community distribution that earlier forked from Mandriva declines to work with Mandriva's community effort (announcement, LWN article on the announcement and an earlier article on the status of Mandriva).

When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash. What secret sauce powered its success? The Net prospered precisely because governments — for the most part — allowed the Internet to grow organically, with civil society, academia, private sector and voluntary standards bodies collaborating on development, operation and governance.

-- Vint Cerf

The printerd project is announced (LWN article).

Linux 3.4 is released (announcement; KernelNewbies summary; LWN merge window summaries part 1, part 2, and part 3; LWN development statistics article).

Mageia 2 is released (announcement and LWN article).

LLVM 3.1 is released (announcement, release notes)

Nmap version 6 is released (announcement).

ownCloud 4 is released (LWN blurb).

Perl 5.16.0 is released (announcement and LWN article).

The jury in Oracle v. Google finds that Google did not infringe any of Oracle's patents (LWN blurb and earlier article on the case, Groklaw follow-up).

Simon Phipps becomes president of the Open Source Initiative (The H article).

The LibreOffice project embarks on a project to rebase and relicense the LibreOffice source code (LWN article).

I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?

-- Judge Alsup (Oracle v. Google) has a clue

The Software Freedom Conservancy announces that it is expanding its license compliance efforts after signing up multiple Linux kernel and Samba developers whose copyrights can be used in license compliance efforts (article).

Fedora 17 is released (announcement).

GCC explorer is released (LWN blurb).

RPM 4.10 released (LWN blurb).

systemd 183 is released; this release merges the udev and systemd projects (announcement).

The Linux Foundation announces the existence of the FOSS Bar Code Tracker, a tool for tracking free and open source software components (announcement).

In the Oracle v. Google suit, Judge Alsup rules that the Java APIs are not copyrightable (LWN blurb).

June

Managing a volunteer open source project is a lot like herding kittens, except the kittens randomly appear and disappear because they have day jobs.

-- Matt Mackall

Obnam 1.0 is released (LWN blurb and article on this backup system).

LinuxCon Japan is held in Yokohama, June 6-8 (videos; LWN coverage: Making kernel developers less grumpy; OpenRelief launches; One zImage to rule them all; Advice for new kernel hackers; The business of contribution).

From the tone of the hearing, and the language of the House resolution, we are being asked to believe that "the position of the United States Government has been and is to advocate for the flow of information free from government control."

If only it were true. The reality is that Congress increasingly has its paws all over the Internet. Lawmakers and regulators are busier than ever trying to expand the horizons of cyber-control across the board: copyright mandates, cybersecurity rules, privacy regulations, speech controls, and much more.

-- Jerry Brito and Adam Thierer

Debian accepts a diversity statement (announcement).

Linus Torvalds co-wins the Millennium Technology Prize (BBC report).

The Apple versus Google-owned Motorola patent litigation takes a surprising turn as Judge Richard Posner dismisses the case, calling the patent system "dysfunctional" (GigaOm article). [Emacs logo]

Emacs 24.1 is released (announcement).

MPlayer 1.1 is released (LWN blurb).

X11R7.7 is released (announcement and LWN article). [X.Org logo]

SystemTap 1.8 is released (announcement).

Ulogd 2.0.0 is released (announcement).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation announces the Defend Innovation patent reform project (press release).

The Fedora and Ubuntu distributions outline their plans for dealing with UEFI secure boot (LWN article on the Fedora plan and the Ubuntu plan). [Red Hat logo]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 is released (LWN blurb, release notes).

August

Trust me: every problem in computer science may be solved by an indirection, but those indirections are *expensive*. Pointer chasing is just about the most expensive thing you can do on modern CPU's.

-- Linus Torvalds

The KDE project releases KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and KDE Platform 4.9 (announcement).

Texas Linux Fest is held in San Antonio (LWN coverage: TexOS teaching open source).

LibreOffice 3.6 is released (announcement, LWN blurb and an earlier article looking at the branding challenge facing LibreOffice).

Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.

-- Google

SCO files for Chapter 7 liquidation (LWN blurb).

CyanogenMod 9.0 is released (LWN blurb and earlier article previewing the release).

The GNOME project turns 15 (LWN article).

Calligra 2.5 is released (announcement, LWN blurb).

Valgrind 3.8.0 is released (announcement).

Digia acquires Qt from Nokia (LWN blurb).

PowerTop 2.1 is released (LWN article).

Ben Hutchings announces plans to support the 3.2 kernel until Debian 7.0 reaches end of life, which probably means end of 2015 (announcement).

FreedomBox 0.1 is released (announcement, earlier LWN article on FreedomBox as an alternative to commercial home routers). [FreedomBox logo]

A critical Java zero-day exploit emerges (The H article).

The third GStreamer Conference is held in San Diego, California, August 27-28 (LWN coverage: The approach of GStreamer 1.0; The road ahead; Linux media subsystems).

The 2012 Linux Kernel Summit is held in San Diego, California, August 27-29 (LWN provided extensive coverage of the main summit, as well as the associated the ARM minisummit, Linux Security Summit, and memcg/mm minisummit).

Most importantly, a series of leaks over the past few years containing more than 100 million real-world passwords have provided crackers with important new insights about how people in different walks of life choose passwords on different sites or in different settings. The ever-growing list of leaked passwords allows programmers to write rules that make cracking algorithms faster and more accurate; password attacks have become cut-and-paste exercises that even script kiddies can perform with ease.

-- Dan Goodin in ars technica

LinuxCon North America is held in San Diego, California, August 29-31 (LWN coverage: Funding development; Open hardware for open hardware; Dragons and penguins in space; The tragedy of the commons gatekeepers).

The Linux Plumbers Conference is held in San Diego, California, August 29-31 (LWN coverage: Realtime microconference).

MongoDB 2.2 is released (announcement).

The jury in the Apple v. Samsung patent suit finds in favor of Apple on almost all claims (LWN blurb, LWN article on look-and-feel lawsuits).

September

So yeah, I do acknowledge that both modes of working make sense, I just believe the default approach should be one where focus is on stabilizing things, not on developing new stuff all the time.

-- Lennart Poettering

Linux From Scratch 7.2 is released (announcement).

openSUSE 12.2 is released (LWN blurb).

Qubes 1.0 is released (LWN blurb).

QEMU 1.2 is released (LWN blurb).

Twisted 12.2.0 is released (announcement).

Yes I have now read kernel bugzilla, every open bug (and closed over half of them). An interesting read, mysteries that Sherlock Holmes would puzzle over, a length that wanted a good editor urgently, an interesting line in social commentary, the odd bit of unnecessary bad language. As a read it is however overall not well explained or structured.

-- Alan Cox

PostgreSQL 9.2 is released (announcement, LWN article on the 9.2 beta).

GNU patch 2.7 is released (announcement).

SyncEvolution 1.3 is released (announcement).

Cinnamon 1.6 is released (announcement).

The Linux Foundation announces the creation of the Automotive Grade Linux workgroup (LWN blurb).

Rackspace announces that it is handing over the OpenStack project OpenStack Foundation (LWN blurb).

The OpenStreetMap project completes relicensing of its database to Open Database License (announcement and 2008 LWN article on the motivation for the license change).

The second Automotive Linux Summit is held in Gaydon, England (LWN coverage: First signs of actual code; Automotive Grade Linux).

The X.Org Developers Conference is held in Nuremberg, Germany (LWN coverage: Status report from the X.Org Board; Graphics stack security; Programming languages for X application development; OpenGL futures).

GeeXboX 3.0 is released (LWN blurb).

Canonical decides to include Amazon search results in the Ubuntu Dash (LWN blurb).

If by "intuitive" you mean "the same as the old interface" then I must agree. Otherwise, I think you are just trying to hold on to what you know.

-- David Lehman

Tent 0.1 is released (LWN blurb and article).

GStreamer 1.0 is released (LWN blurb and article previewing the release).

GTK+ 3.6.0 is released (announcement).

GNOME 3.6 released (LWN blurb).

Slackware 14 is released (LWN blurb).

Open webOS 1.0 is released (announcement).

It is an accepted fact that memcg sucks. But can it suck faster?

-- Glauber Costa

Calibre 0.9.0 is released (announcement).

Python 3.3.0 is released (announcement, what's new in 3.3 document).

CIA.vc shuts down (LWN article).

Joomla 3.0 is released (LWN blurb).

Linux 3.6 is released (announcement; KernelNewbies summary; LWN merge window summaries: part 1, part 2, and part 3; LWN development statistics article).

October

That is not how open source works, you need to do 90% of the work upfront, people only join when you have something useful.

-- Miguel de Icaza

Samsung releases the F2FS filesystem (blurb and article).

KDE releases a manifesto (LWN blurb).

HTTPS Everywhere 3.0 is released (announcement).

Systemtap 2.0 is released (announcement).

The first Korea Linux Forum is held in Seoul, October 11-12 (LWN report).

When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.

-- Rob Pike

Canonical provides users with a mechanism to directly fund development of Ubuntu (LWN article).

NetBSD 6.0 is released (announcement). [NetBSD logo]

The Whonix distribution makes an alpha release (LWN article).

The Privacyfix browser plugin is released (LWN article).

Plasma Active Three is released (LWN blurb). [Plasma Active logo]

The 2012 Realtime Minisummit is held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in conjunction with the 14th Real Time Linux Workshop, October 18-20 (LWN minisummit coverage; LWN coverage of workshop sessions: Modeling systems with Alloy; Realtime Linux for aircraft).

An ext4 data corruption bug receives wide media coverage, but in practice is rather difficult to trigger (LWN blurb and article).

The Debian technical committee renders a judgement regarding long-standing difficulties between the maintainers of various Debian Python packages (LWN article).

Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) is released (announcement).

Apache OpenOffice graduates from the Apache Incubator (announcement).

If you want to pick a fight, insult a designer by asking why we don’t “just learn to code.”

-- Crystal Beasley

Git 1.8.0 is released (announcement).

Wayland and Weston 1.0 are released (announcement).

Arduino 1.5 is released (announcement).

Yocto 1.3 "danny" is released (announcement).

November

The Linaro Enterprise group is formed (announcement).

The openSUSE project releases openSUSE 12.2 for ARM (announcement).

Put another way, having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.

-- Glenn Greenwald, commenting on the process leading to the fall of CIA Director David Petraeus

The Fedora project announces an alpha release of Fedora 18 that supports ARM; the Fedora ARM developers hope to make F18 the first release that supports ARM as a primary architecture. (announcement).

OpenBSD 5.2 is released (LWN blurb and article on some challenges that OpenBSD the other BSDs face in trying to keep pace with Linux). [Asterisk logo]

Asterisk 11 is released (LWN blurb).

The release date of Fedora 18 slips significantly, from the originally expected November to January (announcement, LWN article).

LinuxCon Europe is held in Barcelona, Spain, November 5-9 (LWN coverage: Challenges for Linux networking; Systemd two years on; The failure of operating systems and how we can fix it; All watched over by machines of loving grace; Realtime, present and future; Checkpoint/restore in user space: are we there yet?; Don't play dice with random numbers).

The GNOME project announces that fallback mode will be dropped in the upcoming 3.8 release (LWN blurb; a short time later, the project announces plans for a "classic" mode).

Our patent system is the envy of the world.

-- David Kappos, head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office

Android 4.2 is released (LWN article).

The VLC projects completes relicensing much of its code from GPL to LGPL (LWN article).

The Portuguese government adopts ODF (LWN blurb).

A backdoor is inserted into the Piwik web server; the problem is quickly fixed and notified (LWN blurb).

Linux Mint 14 is released (announcement).

Upstart 1.6 is released (LWN blurb).

The CyanogenMod project starts releasing stable builds of CyanogenMod 10 (LWN article on running this version on the Nexus 7 tablet).

Wikipedia rolls out an HTML5 video player (LWN article).

Ubuntu makes a distribution for the Nexus 7 (LWN article).

Darktable 1.1 is released (LWN article).

December

So next time you're not happy about something: just prefix your criticism with "I think". You may be surprised what difference it makes to the conversation.

Oh, two other magic words: "for me". Compare "This workflow is completely broken" vs "This workflow is completely broken for me". Amazing what difference those two words make...

-- Peter Hutterer

The Google Summer of Code Doc Camp 2012 takes place in Mountain View, California, December 3-7 (LWN coverage: Documentation unconference; Book sprints).

NetBSD 5.2 is released (announcement).

The MariaDB Foundation is formed (announcement). [MariaDB logo]

Ekiga 4.0 is released (announcement, LWN article).

The first "shim" UEFI secure bootloader is released (announcement).

Linux 3.7 is released (announcement; KernelNewbies summary; LWN merge window summaries: part 1, part 2, and part 3; LWN development statistics article).

I once scoffed at the idea that anyone would write in COBOL anymore, as if the average COBOL programmer was some sort of second-class technology citizen. COBOL programmers in 1991, and even today, are surely good programmers — doing useful things for their jobs. The same is true of Perl these days: maybe Perl is finally getting a bit old fashioned — but there are good developers, still doing useful things with Perl. Perl is becoming Free Software's COBOL: an aging language that still has value.

Perl turns 25 years old today. COBOL was 25 years old in 1984, right at the time when I first started programming. To those young people who start programming today: I hope you'll learn from my mistake. Don't scoff at the Perl programmers. 25 years from now, you may regret scoffing at them as much as I regret scoffing at the COBOL developers. Programmers are programmers; don't judge them because you don't like their favorite language.

-- Bradley Kuhn

Firefox OS Simulator 1.0 is released (LWN article).

SparkleShare 1.0 is released (LWN blurb).

Bison 2.7 is released (announcement).

Richard Stallman criticizes desktop searching in Ubuntu Unity, which relays search terms to Canonical servers (LWN blurb and article).

Samba 4.0 is released (announcement and earlier article).

A number of Samsung Android phones are revealed to have a significant security hole, a device file that gives write access to all physical memory on the phone (LWN blurb).

Eudev, a project to create a Gentoo-based fork of udev, is launched (announcement, LWN article).

Qt 5.0 is released (LWN blurb).

PulseAudio 3.0 is released (announcement).

The status.net service is phased out, and replaced by pump.io (LWN blurb).

Gnumeric 1.12 released (announcement).

The Perl programming language turns 25 this month (timeline from Perl Foundation News).

So after I released 3.7-nohz1, I shut down the light then sat down in front of an empty wall in my flat and waited in the darkness with a black tea for december 21th's apocalypse.

But then after a few days, I've been thinking I should have taken a second cup of tea with me.

So I eventually got up and turned the light on. Then I booted my computer and started working on that new release of the full dynticks patchset.

-- Frederic Weisbecker learns that the apocalypse is not nigh

A hash-based DoS attack on Btrfs is disclosed (LWN blurb).

LLVM 3.2 is released (announcement, release notes).

Discontent in the GNU project becomes evident as the GnuTLS maintainer moves the project outside GNU and the GNU sed maintainer resigns (sed maintainer resignation note, LWN article on events in the GnuTLS project).

Awesome 3.5 is released (LWN blurb and earlier article on this window manager).

Enlightenment 0.17 is released (announcement and earlier LWN article on this window manager).

The GNU C library (glibc) version 2.17 is released (announcement).

FreeBSD 9.1 is released (announcement, release notes).

BlueZ 5.0 is released (announcement, LWN article).

GNU Automake 1.13 is released (announcement).