2005 Linux and free software timeline: February

[Posted December 20, 2005 by corbet]

Open-source software's potential risks for intellectual property infringement litigation and the lack of warranties, indemnities and other protections mean businesses should be clamping down on open-source software.

--Law.com

The long-awaited Fedora Extras repository becomes available (announcement).

The European Parliament legal affairs committee votes for a restart of the software patent directive process (Groklaw).

Eben Moglen founds the Software Freedom Law Center (press release).

Sunbird 0.2 is released; this is the first "official" release of the Mozilla calendaring application (article).

Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the UNIX software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities.

--Judge Kimball

All motions for summary judgment in the SCO case are denied, though IBM will get to try again when discovery completes (article).

Slackware 10.1 is released (announcement).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is released.

The Open Source Initiative decides there are too many licenses; an effort to trim them back is announced (News.com coverage).

The Dutch parliament opposes software patents in Europe (FFII release).

Bradley Kuhn leaves the Free Software Foundation to work at the Software Freedom Law Center; he is replaced by Peter Brown (announcement).

It's exactly the same as a file system. If you put some files into a file system does the file system creator owe you the knowledge of how those files are maintained in the file system? Since when is that part of the deal?

--Larry McVoy on BitKeeper history

Numerous popular packages are pushed out of Fedora Core and into the "extras" repository; these include abiword, gnumeric, koffice, sylpheed, xfce, and more (article).

The SCO Group misses its SEC filing deadline and is nearly delisted as a result.

The German Bundestag votes in favor of a restart of the software patent directive process (NoSoftwarePatents dispatch).

IBM dumps Jikes into SourceForge, along with 30 other projects it no longer wants to host (press release).

MandrakeSoft and Conectiva agree to merge (press release).

Firefox 1.0.1 is released with security fixes but the automatic update mechanism fails to work (article).

The European Council ignores the parliament's request for a restart of the software patent directive process.

<== January

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