Ten-year timeline part 6: almost to the present (original) (raw)

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Part 5 of this increasingly long series stopped in March, 2004, when BitMover loudly proclaimed that the use of BitKeeper had doubled the pace of kernel development. This installment picks up from there, looking at a year when BitKeeper remained in the news, the SCO case was in progress, software patents became more threatening, and more.

This week featured some important news. The launch of X.org signaled the resurrection of Linux desktop work and the beginning of a much more interesting and promising era. Meanwhile, Fedora took the lead in pushing SELinux-based mandatory access control technology into a general-purpose system. That work is still very much in progress nearly four years later, but, like it or not, SELinux has become an important part of our defensive arsenal.

Something else which was going on during this time was a rising level of discontent over the management of the Fedora project, which was not turning out to be the open community that many had hoped for. Pause for a moment and revisit this classic dialog posted by Konstantin Ryabitsev, which so clearly documented how the situation was seen by the community at that time. Fedora has come a long way since then.

Remember: the directive approved by the Council was the _original_version which legitimized software patents, not the version amended by the Parliament which did not. Thus started the final (so far) round in the fight against European software patents - a round which we eventually won.

The thing to remember here is that 2.6 was alleged to be a stable kernel series, and everybody was still waiting for 2.7 to start. Linus defended the massive VM changes with the claim that they were, in fact, an "implementation detail." The realization that the kernel development process had, in fact, already changed did not come through until...

This kernel summit decision - which, among other things, said that there would be no 2.7 kernel - surprised almost everybody. Certainly there have been some issues since then, but nobody really wants to go back to the old, pre-2.6 days.

There were interesting cross-currents happening at this time. On the one hand, companies like Open Source Risk Management were trying to use SCO as a way to scare companies (and individual developers) into buying its insurance offerings. On the other, there was a hallucinogenic aspect to the SCO Forum discussions that escaped nobody; SCO's time of being taken seriously by the wider world was already done.

It's worth noting that OSRM still exists, but its insurance offering now is for companies worried about GPL-infringement suits.

Meanwhile, 2.6.8.1 was the first three-dot kernel release ever; it was rushed out in response to an unpleasant, last-minute bug in 2.6.8.

OSDL and the FSG were, at this point, separate groups which, at times, almost seemed to be in competition with each other. Those days, of course, are no more: the two have since merged and become the Linux Foundation.

Who would have thought that one could create a major new distribution in 2004? One might well wonder whether the situation is any less open now.

The Firefox 1.0 release was, in a very real sense, the much-delayed culmination of the process which began back in 1998, when Netscape announced that it would be releasing its code. Firefox was almost seven years in the making, but, sometimes, late really is better than never. Even those of us who use a different browser should be thankful for the effect Firefox has had toward the creation of a standard-compliant web and a competitive environment for web browsers.

Whether it's called United Linux, the Linux Core Consortium, or Manbo-Labs, this is an idea which returns on occasion: pool effort on the creation of a base distribution so that each player can concentrate their differentiation efforts on the higher levels. It often seems not to work, though. It is hard to compete with more community-based distributions through the establishment of a base platform by corporate fiat. It seems that the true "base" distributions have names like Debian or Fedora.

The locking-up of metadata within BitKeeper was a sore point even for developers who had accepted BitKeeper in general. Larry McVoy was unsympathetic, though, stating that he was operating within his rights. This episode was the beginning of the end for BitKeeper and the kernel.

Those quality concerns are not gone now, though they have diminished somewhat. The -stable tree seemed like an experiment at the time, but it has proved successful and is still being produced almost three years later.

The termination of free-beer BitKeeper was probably inevitable from the very beginning of its existence; trying to maintain a closed system with proprietary data formats in the middle of a highly open process was always a losing proposition. For some time, many of us had feared that it could end in a much uglier way than it actually played out. We, the community, had danced on some thin ice for a while, but, when it broke, the water was only ankle-deep. We got lucky.

As your editor has said before, BitKeeper did us a lot of good by bringing order to the kernel development process when things had been working very poorly, and by showing the world what distributed revision control could do. It set the stage for what came after. Git was not the first free distributed revision control system, but it was the first to be employed on such a massive scale. In a real sense, git launched a new era of free software development.

On that note, this article will end - and, probably, the retrospective series ends as well. As events become more recent, the difficulty of putting them into historical perspective gets greater. A retrospective covering the remaining 2+ years risks becoming a repeat of the annual timelines and adding little of value. That period is best left for the 20-year retrospective.

So, the entire LWN staff would like to say "thanks!" one last time to our readers, who have treated us so well for the last ten years. It has been an incredible ride.