The LWN.net 2005 Linux and free software timeline

For eight years now, the editors at LWN.net have put together a timeline highlighting the most important events of the last twelve months. As always, it has been a busy year. Attacks against free software continued in legislatures and the courts - but few have been successful. Corporations began donating patents to the community, some with more enthusiasm than others. The kernel developers improved their process - and dealt with the abrupt loss of their source code management system. SUSE development became more open. SonyBMG gave us all a lesson on the importance of control over our own computers. And so on.

Most importantly, in 2005 the free software community kept on hacking. The variety and quality of the resulting software is simply amazing. The free software community is healthy and growing, despite the legal problems, corporate layoffs, hardware hassles, and occasional petty internal bickering. We are going strong.

This is version 1.0 of the 2005 timeline. If you find any errors or remaining major omissions, please send them to us at timeline@lwn.net; please do not post errors or omissions as comments until after we have had a chance to address them.

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

As usual, the timeline is split up by month. One of these years, we really will restore the "one big page" option, honest.

January February March April

May June July August

September October November December

For the historically minded, the timelines for the previous seven years remain available:

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

Thanks to the following people who have helped improve the 2005 Timeline: Ross Combs, Bernhard Reiter, Karl Schendel, and David A. Wheeler.

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