The Linux Year [part 1] - a look back at 2005

Posted on 22 Dec 2005 at 11:30

With the birth of each new year, the accolade of 'year of the penguin' has been dusted off and pre-emptively awarded time after time. 2005 was no different, and there's little reason to suppose that 2006 will underwhelm either.

We're coming out of 2005 with a massive vindication of the open source movement. We now have patent bodies co-ordinating and even acquiring patents for royalty-free use by the community. The founding licence - the GNU General Public Licence - is being updated for the first time in more than 15 years. Any litigious threat seems to have had nearly no impact on Linux and open source: and this at a time when patent holders are waving their portfolios ever more wildly in court.

Plus there have been major shifts in the technological landscape as well. Not least of which was the momentum, right at the start of the year, behind Sun Microsystem's efforts to get its CDDL licence approved by the OSI as open source, under which it was to contribute its Solaris 10 operating system. It was ratified by the OSI later in January.

January also saw the first instance of what was to be a major theme for the year when IBM opened up a set of some 500 patents for royalty-free use by the open source community.

The month ended with similar news when Sun officially announced it would release Solaris under the CDDL, effectively giving access to a further 1,600 patents (although terms of that licence restricted it from being used with GPL code).

February saw the beginning of the end for the ill-fated Computer Implemented Inventions (CII) draft EU Directive, which would potentially have formally legalised software patents throughout Europe. The first signs of its terminal condition arose when a Legal Affairs committee recommended that it be sent back to the drawing board.

This month we also managed to square up the Linux and Microsoft camps with a pair of reports focussed on the human resources needed for developing software.

There were sighs from the Linux camp too when SCO announced it had been able to secure a meeting with the Nasdaq authorities to straighten things out after accounting discrepancies looked likely to see the litigious company de-listed.

From descendant to ascendant, French Linux builder Mandrake shelled out a Euro or two when it picked up Brazilian rival Conectiva, to form what has become Mandriva.

March came in like a lion, with the European Commission growling that it wouldn't rewrite that directive, which subsequently made it on unchanged to a second reading.

Novell showed that its Linux makeover may turn out to be its salvation, with boss Jack Messman saying NetWare was haemorrhaging customers prior to its SUSE buy.

April found us deep in conversation with Nelson Pratt, Marketing Director at the OSDL, who pointed us in the direction of future twists in the Linux tail throughout the year.

Later in the month the OSDL's Linux leader Linus Torvalds revealed that an attempt to write a toolset so that Linux developers could access the proprietary database where kernel code was stored by the OSDL ended up with the software vendor withdrawing its licence, and landed the Linux community with the task of building its own version - code-named 'git'.