The 2008 Linux and free software timeline

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

As always, 2008 proved to be an interesting year, with great progress in useful software that made our systems better. Of course, there were some of the usual conflicts—patent woes, project politics, and arguments over freedom—but overall, the pace of free software progress stayed on its upwardly increasing trend. 2008 was a year that saw the end of SCO—or not—the rise of Linux-based "netbooks", multiple excellent distribution releases, more phones and embedded devices based on Linux, as well as major releases of software we will be using for years (X.org, Python, KDE, ...). We look forward to seeing what 2009—and beyond!—will bring.

This is version 0.95 of the 2008 timeline. There are certainly errors and omissions; if you find any, please send them to timeline@lwn.net rather than posting them as comments.

The development of the LWN.net Linux Timeline was supported by LWN subscribers; if you like what you see, please consider subscribing to LWN.

January: SCO delisted, Sun buys MySQL, KDE 4, 2.6.24, ...

February: Mozilla Messaging, LSB 3.2, vmsplice() , ...

, ... March: OpenOffice, GCC, ...

April: OOXML approved, 2.6.25, Ubuntu 8.04, ...

May: Fedora 9, Sugar Labs, Debian OpenSSL bug, ...

June: Wine 1.0, openSUSE 11.0, Firefox 3, ... July: Kaminsky DNS flaw, 2.6.26, Stormy Peters, ...

August: Fedora infrastructure, JMRI, Debian, ...

September: Kernel Summit, Linux Plumbers Conference, Firefox EULA, ...

October: GIMP 2.6, Python 2.6, 2.6.27, Ubuntu 8.10, ...

November: Theora, iPhone Linux, Fedora 10, MySQL 5.1, ...

December: Python 3.0, Debian woes, FSF vs. Cisco, Slackware 12.2, openSUSE 11.1, ...

For previous years' timelines, head over to our timeline index.

Acknowledgments: Felix Braun, Stephan Binner, Jesse Weinstein, Gerald Combs, Greg Woods, Carlos Manuel Duclos Vergara, Greg Roelofs, and Diego Calleja all made suggestions or corrections to help make this timeline better.

January

At the top of the list of continuations is SCO. No matter how the legal action pans out, it will continue to dominate direction setting in the Linux community - and until or unless IBM gets its collective head straight on the issue and cleans house, the polarization this case has led to will continue to undermine Linux legitimacy. -- "Paul Murphy" misses the boat

NetBSD 4.0 released (announcement).

Linux 0.01 released after being ported to gcc-4.x (announcement).

SCO delisted from Nasdaq (Groklaw article).

Intel leaves One Laptop Per Child project in part because of a dispute about the Classmate PC (NY Times article).

Red Hat names Jim Whitehurst as CEO (press release).

Open source is a way to focus on the customer, letting us grow, succeed, and change the technology landscape...all while doing something that is fundamentally good. Fighting for open standards and open formats. These things will change society. I'm thrilled to be here. -- Jim Whitehurst, new Red Hat CEO

The Open Source Application Foundation restructures as Mitch Kapor stops funding it (announcement).

John Lilly named as new Mozilla Corp. CEO, Mitchell Baker drops one of her Mozilla titles. (blog entry).

OpenMoko gets spun out of FIC as separate company (announcement).

Sun buys MySQL A.B. (announcement).

Paul Frields becomes Fedora Project Leader (announcement).

The Gentoo Foundation loses its charter in New Mexico where it was incorporated (blog entry).

KDE 4.0 released well before it was ready, at least according to some (announcement).

User space developers are weenies. One of the most fun parts of git development for me has been how easy everything is ;) -- Linus Torvalds

The One Laptop Per Child project flirts with Windows to the annoyance of many in the free software community (Computerworld article).

Qt goes GPLv3, the highest profile switch to date (press release).

Linux 2.6.24 released (announcement).

LWN.net celebrates its 10th anniversary on January 30 at linux.conf.au (conference overview).

Nokia buys Trolltech (press release).

Intel releases manuals for its graphics chipsets, in particular the 965 Express and G35 Express (report).

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February

I want to do what I can to help coordinate increased cooperation between Linux distros and reduce duplication of effort. While a lot of folks might like to portray the situation as openSUSE vs. Fedora, Ubuntu, or any other distro, I don't see it that way -- if someone is already happily using another distro, then I consider that a win. I want to focus on attracting people who aren't running Linux at all yet. -- Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier named as openSUSE community manager (announcement).

PostgreSQL 8.3 released (announcment).

Stephen Rothwell starts the linux-next tree (announcement).

The vmsplice() vulnerability is found in the kernel, which allows a local user to get root (report part 1 and part 2).

For a time, there was a conflict between Open Source and Free Software evangelism. My intent has always been for Open Source to simply be another way of talking about Free Software, tailored to the ears of business people, and that it would eventually lead them to a greater appreciation of Richard Stallman's arguments. -- Bruce Perens on the 10th anniversary of the Open Source Definition

Mozilla Messaging starts up operations – this is the Thunderbird spin-off (press release).

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) releases free software legal primer to help projects understand licensing and other legal issues (primer).

The Linux Foundation releases Linux Standard Base 3.2 (press release).

Disk encryption foiled by reading keys from RAM after a reboot – power cycling does not clear memory (Freedom to Tinker blog).

Schroedinger 1.0 released, which is a reference implementation of the Dirac video codec (announcement).

Microsoft announces major changes to promote "interoperability" (press release).

FreeBSD 7.0 released (announcement).

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March

That is not particularly important, because Linux isn't a GNU package. If it were a GNU package, I would write to its maintainers to suggest using Bzr. -- Richard Stallman

GNOME 2.22 released (announcement).

OpenOffice.org moves to LGPLv3 for the upcoming OO.o 3.0 release (annoucement).

GCC 4.3.0 released, exposing a kernel bug in the process (announcement).

NetBSD celebrates its 15th anniversary (announcement).

I have often found it somewhat strange that mercurial doesn't have more active vocal proponents. Usually one hears from the git or bzr proponents, but not so much from mercurial. Yet it has always had many of the advantages of both (and, in some ways seems to have the most svn-like UI, and would seem a more natural transition for svn converts). -- Elijah Newren

Mercurial 1.0 released—another distributed version control system choice (announcement).

Support for Debian "sarge" (3.1) ends, three years after its release and a year after "etch" (4.0) (announcement).

Solid-state disks are going to put a lot of code out of a job. -- Andrew Morton

The first Document Freedom Day is held, proclaimed by the Free Software Foundation Europe (announcement).

Harald Welte receives an award for the Advancement of Free Software bestowed by the Free Software Foundation. (announcement).

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April

ISO approves Microsoft's OOXML document format, creating two international document format "standards" (LWN article).

Since 2005, over 3700 individual developers from over 200 different companies have contributed to the kernel. The Linux kernel, thus, has become a common resource developed on a massive scale by companies which are fierce competitors in other areas. -- Linux Foundation white paper

The Linux Foundation releases Linux Kernel Development white paper that measures and categorizes kernel contributions (paper).

OpenOffice.org 2.4 released (announcement).

Adobe joins the Linux Foundation (report).

Mandriva releases Linux 2008 Spring, aka 2008.1 (press release).

There will always be some users who won't believe in Debian as an option for the enterprise just because we're not directly backed by a large corporation, and that will be a difficult attitude to change. However, I know of lots of companies today that will provide paid support for Debian where it's required, and we already have a fine reputation for stability. I think that the next trick is to start making more of a positive impact directly in the "Enterprise" space with positive press exposure and good reviews. -- Steve McIntyre, new Debian project leader

Steve McIntyre is elected Debian project leader (announcement).

Linux 2.6.25 released (announcement).

Fedora board changes to community-dominated, with 5 community-elected seats and 4 Red Hat appointed (announcement).

Walter Bender, co-founder and President of Software and Content, leaves OLPC, one of several recent high-profile departures from the project (announcement).

Hans Reiser, creator of ReiserFS and Reiser4, is convicted of first-degree murder (Wired report).

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (aka Hardy Heron) released (announcement).

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May

If we simply throttled things, people would spend more time watching the shopping channel while merging smaller amounts of the same old crap. -- Andrew Morton reflects on slowing down kernel development

OpenBSD 4.3 released (announcement).

Slackware 12.1 released (announcement).

There's one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu's short and long-term cycles around that. -- Mark Shuttleworth ponders distribution synchronization

Debian OpenSSL bug creates insecure keys, causing system administrators lots of headaches (advisory).

Fedora 9 is released (announcement).

Gentoo Foundation returns to good standing in New Mexico (announcement).

New York Stock Exchange runs mission-critical trading systems on Linux (news article).

OLPC clarifies Windows plans, though it still seems rather murky (announcement).

The whole 'we're investing into Sugar, it'll just run on Windows' gambit is sheer nonsense. Nicholas knows quite well that Sugar won't magically become better simply by virtue of running on Windows rather than Linux. -- Ivan Krstić on OLPC direction

Sugar Labs Foundation announces its existence to take the OLPC Sugar interface to the "next level of usability" (announcement).

Multi-pointer support is added to X, allowing multi-touch and collaborative interfaces (announcement).

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June

He is not practical. He is a monopolist, and the current situation is that Linux is strong enough that they get documentation from most vendors, under NDAs. That makes them like the other super power who they love to hate, and keeps all the other people trying to write operating system code third world. And that suits their very American viewpoint just fine, I suppose. -- Theo de Raadt on Linus et al.

The Linux -staging tree is announced, which eventually leads to these "drivers needing attention" getting added to the mainline kernel (announcement).

Fedora 7 reaches end of life (announcement).

Wine releases version 1.0 after 15 years (announcement).

Red Hat settles object-relational database mapping patent suit with Firestar Software and DataTern, that provides licenses for all upstream projects shipped in RHEL. (LWN analysis).

The Django Software Foundation launches as a non-profit to foster development of the Python-based web application framework (announcement).

Nokia announces plans to open source the Symbian mobile phone OS (announcement).

We, the undersigned Linux kernel developers, consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable. We have repeatedly found them to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and the greater Linux ecosystem. Such modules negate the openness, stability, flexibility, and maintainability of the Linux development model and shut their users off from the expertise of the Linux community. -- a long list of kernel hackers

More than 150 kernel developers release a statement opposing binary kernel modules for purely technical, not licensing, reasons (position statement).

HP releases the "Tru64 Advanced Filesystem" (AdvFS) under the GPLv2; while it is unlikely to be widely used, the source will be useful (announcement).

openSUSE 11.0 released (announcement).

NetBSD moves to the two-clause BSD license, removing the advertising clause (announcement).

Mozilla releases Firefox 3, which is downloaded 8 million times in the first 24 hours for a possible world record (announcement).

Ted Ts'o switches his laptop to ext4, which means that filesystem is getting pretty close to ready (Ted's blog entry).

Openmoko ships the Neo Freerunner, its second open-source mobile phone model. (ZDNet coverage).

Xandros acquires Linspire, in a seemingly messy transaction (Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos' Q&A press release, Linspire's ex-CEO Kevin Carmony's blog).

LiPS Forum and LiMo Foundation merge, somewhat reducing the number of players in the Linux mobile phone space (press release).

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July

Samba 3.2.0 released and moves to GPLv3 (announcement).

Barracuda Networks files countersuit against Trend Micro over patent claims against ClamAV, claiming that they are trying to protect the free software anti-virus scanner (press release).

I hope we have a combined GUADEC/Akademy next year. KDE and GNOME have been working more closely together during the past year or so and they have accomplished some good things like with dbus. I think anytime you get great developers together, good things happen. -- new GNOME executive director Stormy Peters

Stormy Peters hired as the GNOME Foundation executive director (announcement).

Dan Kaminsky finds a fundamental flaw in DNS requiring an enormous coordinated vendor release. He will release details in August. (LWN coverage).

Gentoo Linux 2008.0 is released (announcement).

Linux 2.6.26 is released (announcement).

KDE and GNOME agree to a joint conference in 2009 which will incorporate Akademy and GUADEC in Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain in July (conference website).

I've done everything in my power to get the patches available, no matter the platform. But the code doesn't (always) install itself. While I'm out there, trying to get all these bugs scrubbed — old and new — please, keep the speculation off the @public forums and IRC channels. -- Dan Kaminsky asks for the impossible

DragonFlyBSD 2.0 released (announcement).

Debian Lenny (aka 5.0) is frozen with a release "expected" in September (announcement).

VIA Technologies contracts Harald Welte as its Open Source Liaison bringing hope that VIA's open source promises will be kept (announcement).

Firefox adds support for Ogg Vorbis and Theora (Christopher Blizzard's blog).

Microsoft joins the Apache Software Foundation to promote interoperability, or so they claim (ars technica report).

KDE 4.1 is released (announcement Return to top



August

On the other hand, of course we do have an agenda to push and that agenda includes SELinux as being one of the core features of the entire Fedora line of products (including the few enterprise linux spin-offs). -- Jeroen van Meeuwen on Fedora spins

The Chandler Project reaches the 1.0 milestone after 7 years of effort (announcement).

Dan Kaminsky releases details of the DNS flaw several weeks after it had been publicly disclosed (LWN coverage).

The Linux Foundation publishes "How to Participate in the Linux Community" authored by a hitherto unknown kernel hacker by the name of Jonathan Corbet (Guide).

The Fedora project runs into the infamous "infrastructure issues", which were evidently some kind of network break-in, but details have yet to be released (original announcement).

US Appeals Court rules that free software licenses are licenses, not contracts, in the Java Model Railroad Interface case (LWN analysis).

Three MIT students are enjoined from presenting security research about Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) pre-paid cards at DEFCON. The injunction was overturned, but not until after the conference (EFF case information).

Plus it appeals to my sense of the open source way of doing things differently - a major release about getting rid of old junk not about adding more new wackiness people don't need 8) -- Alan Cox advocates Linux 3.0

The Debian project is 15 years old (history).

Canonical joins the Linux Foundation, last of the major commercial distributors to do so (press release).

The Software Freedom Law Center releases "A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance" (Guide).

Novell and Microsoft renew and expand their collaboration (press release).

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September

Linux Plumbers Conference is a conference for developers working on the low level programming of Linux, including kernel, libraries, and system applications such as udev, hal, and dbus. We came up with the name "Plumbers" because we wanted to represent these areas as basic system infrastructure which has many connections. Plus these programs are sort of the nasty, grimy, unglamorous underbelly of the system - not unlike the pipes in your house. Essential - but nobody wants to know they are there and everyone takes them for granted until they don't work. -- Kristen Carlson Accardi

The successor to Debian "Lenny" (5.0) will be "Squeeze", continuing the "Toy Story" theme (announcement).

The Google Chrome web browser is announced by way of a comic, but we are still awaiting a Linux version (comic).

The GNU project celebrates its 25th anniversary with a film featuring English humorist Stephen Fry (announcement).

Django 1.0 is released after three years of development on the Python-based web application framework (annoucement).

North Carolina State University adds a graduate level "Open Source Software Communications" course (Red Hat press release).

Red Hat acquires KVM developers Qumranet, indicating a possible eventual shift away from Xen (press release).

The 2008 Linux Kernel Summit is held in Portland, Oregon, US (coverage).

The first Linux Plumbers Conference is held just after the Kernel Summit (conference web site).

openSUSE holds its first Board elections moving the distribution towards a more open governance model (election web site).

A kernel bug in the 2.6.27 rc releases can turn e1000e ethernet cards into bricks; it takes almost a month to track the problem down (original LWN article and the resolution).

We've come to understand that anything EULA-like is disturbing, even if the content is FLOSS based. So we're eliminating that. -- Mozilla chief lizard wrangler Mitchell Baker

Mozilla's attempt to add a EULA to Firefox for Linux is met with some resistance, resulting in the EULA plan being scrapped (LWN coverage).

Rockbox 3.0, the free firmware replacement for portable music players, is released (announcement).

GNOME 2.24 is released with many improvements and new applications (release notes).

X.org 7.4 is released with the XACE security framework, many new drivers, performance enhancements, and more. (release notes).

The first Android phone is launched, nearly a year after Google announced its mobile phone initiative (Reuters coverage).

The CME Group, who runs the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and other derivatives exchanges, joins the Linux Foundation and will chair the End User Council (press release).

Gentoo cancels the 2008.1 release due to over stressing the release team (announcement).

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October

That's when you also notice that the whole US voting system is apparently expressly designed to be polarizing (winner-take-all electoral system etc). To somebody from Finland, that looks like a rather obvious and fundamental design flaw. In Finland, government is quite commonly a quilt-work of different parties, and the "rainbow coalition" of many many parties working together was the norm for a long time. And it seems to result in much more civilized political behaviour. -- Linus Torvalds in his new blog

GIMP 2.6 is released (release notes).

Atheros releases the source of the ath5k HAL giving every indication that they are truly opening up (announcement).

LinuxCon is announced by the Linux Foundation as a new technical conference; the first is to be held with the Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland in September 2009 (press release).

Python 2.6 is released as a backward-compatible but forward-looking steppingstone to Python 3.0 (announcement).

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is released (announcement).

In the end, to what good is Linux in those devices? Definitely not to any benefit of the user. It's to the benefit of the handset maker, who can skip a pretty expensive Windows Mobile licensing fee. Oh and, yes, they get better memory management than on Symbian ;) That's the brave new world. It makes me sick. -- Harald Welte on so-called Linux phones

Linux 2.6.27 is released (announcement).

Mandriva Linux 2009 is released (press release).

Google finally releases Android source (code web site).

The Linux Foundation appraises the Linux kernel at $1.4 billion and the entire Fedora 9 release at $10.8 billion (study).

The EFF marks ten years since the DMCA was enacted with a report on its unintended consequences (report).

The Fedora OLPC SIG announces the Fedora Sugar spin incorporating the Sugar desktop environment onto a Fedora Live CD (announcement).

Ubuntu 8.10, aka Intrepid Ibex, is released (announcement).

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November

OLPC has placed a very large bet on open source software. In order to be successful, they need knowledgeable contributors — which Fedora has in abundance. There may be more than a million XOs in the wild by the end of this year, and all of them will be running a remix of Fedora by default. In Fedora, we have a responsibility to help make OLPC successful, and the Fedora community takes that responsibility very seriously. -- Greg DeKoenigsberg

OpenBSD 4.4 is released (announcement).

The Theora video codec version 1.0 is released (announcement).

The FSF announces the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 that will allow Wikipedia to relicense its content under the Creative Commons attribution-sharealike license (LWN coverage).

The Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler framework version 2.4 is released (release notes).

I'll write personal certificates of deposit to each awardee's account at the Bank of San Serriffe, which is an offshore institution that has branches in Blefuscu and Elbonia on the planet Pincus. Instead of writing personal checks,to each awardee's account at the Bank of San Serriffe, which is an offshore institution that has branches in Blefuscu and Elbonia on the planet Pincus. -- Donald Knuth gets tired of check fraud

Stani Michiels shows "How to make money with free software" by designing a Dutch 5 euro commemorative coin using only Python tools (blog post).

Linux is ported to the iPhone (Why iPhone Linux?).

The OLPC Give One Get One program moves to Amazon for fulfillment and expands into Europe (Amazon site).

The SCO case continues to not go away, even after "final" judgment—SCO appeals, of course (Groklaw coverage: final judgment and appeal).

Meanwhile, 10 years and counting, the Linux kernel still generates a stupid write IO for every file read that apps do. Fortunately hardware designers will get rid of rotating disks faster than we can fix our glaring process problems in this space - but it's still a bit sad. -- Ingo Molnar complains about atime

Adobe releases a 64-bit alpha version of Flash 10 for Linux ahead of Windows or OS X (Adobe FAQ).

Fedora 10 is released (announcement).

The first production version of MySQL 5.1 is released though there are complaints about the process and release (LWN coverage).

The Linux kernel is in "full compliance" with the US government IPv6 interoperability certification (press release).

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December

The Mercurial "fast, lightweight Source Control Management system" releases version 1.1 (release notes).

I expect better: You never see me hard with time word making sentence coherent stuff. Ever. -- Rusty Russell

Python 3.0 (aka Python 3000 or Py3k) is released, which is incompatible by design with Python 2.x (Guido's What's New document).

A buggy Fedora update to D-Bus makes it impossible for users to install further updates via PackageKit (Paul Frield's explanation).

The Amarok digital music player and manager releases version 2.0 (announcement).

Google releases the unlocked Android Dev Phone 1 for developers or those wanting a phone they can completely control (purchasing info).

The Open Invention Network sponsors the Linux Defenders project to protect free software from patents and patent trolls. The project is co-sponsored by the Linux Foundation and Software Freedom Law Center (project web site).

It's an interesting, science-fictiony, parallel-world story to imagine what would have happened if Richard Stallman hadn't come along with the GPL. Without Richard Stallman's insight, I think we would have eventually got something like what we got with free software, but it would have been a very interesting muddle. -- Vernor Vinge

The Debian project runs into problems with firmware (again) along with an unclear general resolution ballot which causes discord, eventually leading to the resignation of the project secretary (LWN article about the discord and resignation letter).

The Free Software Foundation sues Cisco for violating the GPL in its Linksys line of routers (LWN article).

Slackware 12.2 is released (announcement).

openSUSE 11.1 is released (announcement).

Tcl creator and longtime Benevolent Dictator John Ousterhout retires from the Tcl core team (announcement).

Kernel hacker Ted Ts'o is appointed as the Linux Foundation's Chief Technical Officer (announcement).

Linux 2.6.28 is released (announcement).

Security researchers exploit MD5 collisions to create a bogus SSL certificate, which allows them to spoof any site (news article).

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