See also: last week's Linux History page.

This week in Linux history

Three years ago (August 13, 1998 LWN): Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, Ian Murdock, and Tim Sailor announced the formation of the Open Source Initiative. The OSI's job was to police the use of the "Open Source" trademark and to promote open source in general. Since then Mr. Perens left in anger, the trademark application was denied, and the OSI seems to be dormant (the "what's new page" on the OSI web site was last updated in July, 1999). In fact, we're told that the OSI is more active than it appears, but there isn't much going on there that reaches the public eye.

The formation of the OSI was greeted with a great deal of criticism and anger, and there are certainly many who do not lament its fall from prominence. But the OSI did play a useful role in advocating open source, and in keeping early adopters of the term honest. An article in Upside that week explained it well:

But to a large extent the new visibility of open source is due to a clever marketing strategy on the part of Torvalds and his compadres--and a new willingness to talk the language of the corporation. These days, open source advocates talk less about freedom than about reliability--pointing out that when source code is opened up to the masses, the masses tend to locate and eliminate bugs very quickly.

The OSI was the embodiment of that marketing strategy.

Richard Stallman called for free documentation to accompany free software.

Please spread the word about this issue. We continue to lose manuals to proprietary publishing. If we spread the word that proprietary manuals are not sufficient, perhaps the next person who wants to help GNU by writing documentation will realize, before it is too late, that he must above all make it free.

Since then, the amount of free documentation available has expanded greatly - even if it still is not enough. Publishers no longer panic at the idea of making manual content free. Progress has been made.

The development kernel release was 2.1.115; Linus announced a hard code freeze with this release. This freeze proved less than firm, however, and the 2.2 stable release turned out to be more than five months away. The stable kernel release, meanwhile, remained at 2.0.36.

Two years ago (August 12, 1999 LWN): The second LinuxWorld Conference and Expo was held this week; see LWN's coverage of the event if you are curious.

But the big news, of course, was the successful completion of Red Hat's initial public offering of stock. The actual event caused yet another round of trouble for those participating in the community offering, since a last-minute raise in the IPO price required a reconfirmation of interest. Many of the participants, who were at the conference, had a hard time doing that, though just about everybody got in before it was done.

The stock shot up to a (split-adjusted) price of $26, which seemed amazingly high at the time. The real significance of the IPO was to mark Linux as a truly interesting business phenomenon. Two years later, with the Linux stock frenzy behind us, Linux remains more vital and interesting than ever. Even if the same can not be said for Red Hat's stock.

Andover.Net announced the acquisition of FreshMeat this week. Andover.net (and Freshmeat) were later acquired by VA Linux.

The development kernel was 2.3.13; the long-awaited 2.2.11 stable kernel release also came out this week.

Red Flag Linux, a high-profile Chinese distribution, was announced this week. The newly-renamed Lineo announced its Embedix distribution.

Dell announced they would start selling Linux desktop boxes. Two years later, of course, Dell has just announced that it has had enough of desktop Linux for now.

One year ago (August 10, 2000 LWN): IBM announced a Linux-powered wristwatch, which commanded a great deal of attention. The world loves a cool gadget, and this one certainly did qualify. Click on the image to the right for a picture.

DefCon attracted over 5000 people. Forbes noted the heightened presence of members of the CIA, Department of Defense and the NSA. Their mission ... to hire hackers. That seems a far better reason for law enforcement to be at DefCon. (This year's DefCon was where the arrest of Dimitry Sklyarov happened.)

The 2.4.0-test3 release of the Linux kernel included the surprising addition of the Journaling Flash Filesystem (JFFS), which was not slated to go into the kernel until later. It seems Linus merged it by mistake. Once in, JFFS did not cause any problems so it was left in.

The Linux Test Project is one year old.

LinuxWorld seems to be moving forward as the years go by. While the 1999 LinuxWorld was held this week (see above), the 2000 LinuxWorld was still a week away, and the 2001 LinuxWorld is still over two weeks away. Even though LinuxWorld was still a week away, the commerce page was already swelling with announcements about all the cool products that would be on display.

Stormix launched Storm Linux 2000. One year later...oh well...

Those were the good old days, when VA Linux still sold hardware. ZDNet wrote:

Do you need a workstation? And we mean, an honest-to-goodness, take-no-prisoners, kick-butt Unix workstation? Then you should be looking at VA Linux Systems' tiger shark of a system: the VA Linux 420.

Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol.

LWN Linux Timelines
1998 In Review
1999 In Review
2000 In Review
2001 In Review

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