LWN.net: a ten-year timeline (part 1)

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LWN is about to celebrate a birthday. Picking the true anniversary of an enterprise like LWN can be a bit tricky - there are many points which could be said to mark the true birth of the organization. After some thought, we have decreed that LWN.net was born on January 30, 1998. So we have a tenth anniversary coming up. That's a long time - far longer than any of us thought we would be doing this. Life is funny that way, somehow.

One cannot let a date like this go by without at least partially taking advantage of its hype-creation possibilities. So there will be a few things happening to celebrate our decade of writing about Linux, culminating with some sort of celebration on the 30th, when your editor will be speaking at this year's (sold-out!) linux.conf.au in Melbourne, Australia. One of those will be a short series of articles - starting with this one - looking back at those ten years. What a long, strange trip it has been.

Back in early 1997, your editor was the manager of a software development, system administration, and data delivery group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He had, at that point, been using Linux for a few years. It was running on a number of servers, of course, but we had also deployed it on desktops and used it for the acquisition and display of meteorological data, including high-bandwidth (for the time) doppler radar data. Don't let anybody tell you that real-time Linux is a new thing.

At this time, your editor was seeing two futures: (1) an increasingly dilbertesque life spent mostly in meetings, and (2) the clearly bright future of Linux. So he was actively looking for ways to move out of conference rooms and toward Linux, and talking over schemes with a number of friends. An early idea - to commercialize one of the first weather stations ever put on the World Wide Web with LWN editor Forrest Cook, never quite took off. But that thought process continued.

During that same time, Elizabeth Coolbaugh had just left a very similar position at the same institution; she was looking for a new project for the next phase of her life. After some discussions, Liz and your editor settled on a business idea which seemed to have some promise. It was not to be the last silly decision they were to make.

You see, at that time there was a struggling Linux distributor named Red Hat which was beginning to get the sense that there might be a market for its boxed Linux product in the corporate world. But companies need support, and Red Hat lacked the ability to provide that support. So the company's management came up with the "support partner" concept. Upon being accepted into this program, partner companies would be able to sell Red Hat-backed support certificates, which Red Hat would help to market. This widespread network of Linux experts would be able to provide local support to clients and would, for the hardest problems, be able to get help from Red Hat itself. It looked like a winner for everybody involved.

That program was not yet operational at this time, though - but Red Hat promised it would be Real Soon Now. Your soon-to-be editors, not yet having done much business with Red Hat beyond ordering an occasional CD, believed this promise. But it still made sense to do something productive while waiting. The idea that emerged after some talk was to put up a regular newsletter about what was happening in the fast-evolving Linux community. Even back then, keeping up with everything was hard, so we figured that the service would be valuable. As an added bonus, it would attract attention to this new support company (called Eklektix) and show just how blindingly smart and up on Linux we were.

Discussion of details occurred slowly through much of 1997. On January 22, 1998, the first issue of LWN was posted; it talked about the 2.1.79 kernel, the brand-new spinlock mechanism, the devfs debate, the creation of Red Hat Advanced Development Labs, and attempts to bring Java to Linux. The January 29, 1998 issue changed the format and led off with Netscape's announcement that it would be releasing the source code for its browser. We also found all of two news articles about Linux (we posted every one we found in those days) and talked about NFS problems, the devfs debate, the Debian 2.0 release roadmap, and gcc 2.8 problems.

At this point, we had posted two issues, but had not actually told anybody about them. Unsurprisingly, traffic was low. That changed on January 30, when our announcement made it out to the comp.os.linux.announce newsgroup - the best way to get the news out at that time. As promotional text the announcement was rudimentary at best, but it had the desired result - we got over 1000 page views on that first day, which seemed like a lot at the time. LWN was off and running.

Some highlights from the early days of LWN:

• February 12, 1998: Eric Raymond starts pushing "open source" instead of free software. Worries over whether Intel's proposed "Merced" architecture would support Linux.

• February 19, 1998: Richard Stallman fights back against Open Source. SCO claims to be the largest provider of Unix-based servers. Jesse Berst's famous "could you get fired for choosing Linux?" article runs. Jaroslav Kysela launches the "Ultra" (later ALSA) sound driver project.

• March 12, 1998: Ralph Nader suggests that Dell should sell Linux-installed systems.

• March 19, 1998: Bruce Perens resigns from the Debian project, saying: "I'm sorry it had to be this way, but I feel that my mission to bring free software to the masses really isn't compatible with Debian any longer, and that I should be working with one of the more mainstream Linux distributions." Sendmail, Inc. was launched.

• April 2, 1998: the Mozilla source release happens. Alan Cox joins Red Hat. The feature freeze for the 2.2 kernel is announced. The Open Group announces that use of the X Window System will requires fees - but Linux users had XFree86 and didn't care.

It's fair to say that we didn't entirely grasp the significance of the events reported in the April 2 edition. The hiring of Alan Cox was one of the first in a long series - before then, almost nobody actually had a job which involved developing Linux. The Open Group's attempt to relicense X was thoroughly defeated by the existence of a free version with an active development community - a story which would be repeated a number of times in the coming years.

• April 30, 1998: Red Hat gets around to launching its support program, with Eklektix as one of the four they had managed to sign up. Kernel development halts as a result of the birth of Linus's second child.

• May 28, 1998: LWN moves to its own domain at LWN.net. The Linux Standard Base is proposed. Your editor first describes himself as "grumpy" after producing LWN by himself (Liz was at Linux Expo). PC Week calls Linux "a communist operating system in a capitalist society" and predicts its demise. Red Hat 5.1 is released.

• July 16, 1998: KDE 1.0 is released; KDE v. GNOME flamewars spread across numerous mailing lists and web sites.

• July 23, 1998: Oracle ports some of its products to Linux. Linus decrees that 8MB of memory will be needed for the 2.2 kernel.

The Oracle announcement seems mundane now, but the existence of Oracle products for Linux was a specific indicator that many people were looking for. It was an indication that Linux was a "serious" platform. Richard Stallman, of course, thought that Oracle's announcement was terrible news.

• July 30, 1998: Debian 2.0 is released. Rumors circulate that IBM is considering Linux. Linux-Mandrake is launched.

• August 13, 1998: the Open Source Initiative is launched, flame wars result. Richard Stallman calls for free documentation for free software. The kernel goes into a "hard code freeze" - not the first or last time that a Linus-decreed freeze would prove to be less hard than anticipated. The devfs discussion continues. Red Hat states that it cannot legally ship Qt or KDE.

• August 20, 1998: Red Hat launches Rawhide. Bruce Perens bails out of the Linux Standard Base effort.

• October 1, 1998: Intel and Netscape (and two venture capital firms) invest in Red Hat. Also notable this week was the first of the big "Linus burnout" episodes, making it clear that something in the kernel development process needed to change.

Let us now pause for a moment. From this distance, it may be hard to appreciate just how big the news of the Red Hat investments was. For all that had happened, Linux was still a somewhat obscure phenomenon, unknown to much of the information technology world. When Intel put money into Red Hat, it became clear to all that both Linux and Red Hat were headed toward success. This was, in some real sense, the point where Linux entered the dotcom bubble, though the real action was still a year away.

The 2.1.123 release failed to compile as a result of some merging errors; developers got upset about the state of affairs and a long, inflammatory discussion resulted. Linus stormed out of the virtual room and took a vacation. It was a somewhat scary series of events which foreshadowed more to come; getting the kernel development process to scale as the community grew was a multi-year process.

During this time, LWN was also growing in both readership and size; it was taking increasing amounts of time. We eventually had to move the server from its initial location (behind an ISDN line in your editor's basement) to a proper hosting facility. But, remember, LWN was not the main endeavor; it was an attention attractor for the support services offered by Eklektix, Inc. This business plan was not going particularly well. Those who dealt with Red Hat in that era know that, as a company, it was a rather chaotic place. The marketing for the support partners never happened, and the backup services for the support plans the partners were able to sell themselves were, shall we say, less than the customers thought they deserved given what they had paid. The support partner program was not a big success for anybody involved.

As a result, one of the first things Red Hat did with its new pile of cash was to cancel this program and start building its own, internal support operation. Eklektix continued to push its own support offerings for a while, but the fact of the matter is that it was not a fun business: it seemed to mostly consist of cleaning up after low-budget ISPs which could not be bothered to install security updates. So the search for alternatives began. Meanwhile:

• October 16, 1998: Larry McVoy contacts LWN and describes his upcoming "BitKeeper" software as a way of making Linus "scale". Debian takes an official position against KDE.

• November 5, 1998: The Halloween Memo.

• November 19, 1998: The Qt library becomes available under the new QPL, eliminating roadblocks for the distribution of KDE. VA Research (also known as VA Linux VA Software SourceForge) gets a big venture capital infusion. Red Hat hires Matthew Szulik as CEO.

• The first LWN Linux timeline was released at the end of 1998.

• January 28, 1999: LWN's first anniversary. The 2.2 kernel is released, complete with a trivially-exploited security hole. Linus decrees that 32-bit Linux will never support more than 2GB of memory. The TCP-wrappers distribution is compromised. The Windows refund movement gathers steam.

• February 11, 1999: perhaps the first big discussion of binary-only modules.

• February 25, 1999: IBM announces support for Red Hat Linux on its systems.

About this time, Eklektix announced that its new line of business would be training - and Linux system administration training in particular. The announcement was timed for the first ever LinuxWorld conference; both LWN editors spoke there, with Jon delivering a system administration tutorial to 450 attendees. It was the start of a new phase - though it was not much more successful than the one which came before.

If the investments in Red Hat were the beginning of the Linux bubble, LinuxWorld was where the inflation began in earnest. The amount of money on display there was impressive to say the least. The Red Hat party will live forevermore in the memory (or lack of memory, as the case may be) of all who attended. LinuxCare, which was supposed to be the big support success story for Linux, was unveiled at this conference. Never had there been so much overt commercial interest around Linux.

• March 25, 1999: It turns out that BitKeeper is to come out under a not-really-open-source license.

• April 8, 1999: Discouraged Mozilla developers resign from the project - there was a time when it seemed like a usable Mozilla browser would never come. Dell buys a piece of Red Hat. Al Gore claims to have an open source presidential campaign. RMS battles for "GNU/Linux" on linux-kernel.

• April 15, 1999: the Mindcraft study. It turned out that some of Mindcraft's criticisms were right, but we fixed the problems in a hurry.

• April 27, 1999: The last Linux Expo is held in Raleigh.

It is interesting to note that, during this time, LWN got its first acquisition offer: from Red Hat. We turned it down: the terms of the offer looked much like indentured servitude under firm Red Hat control. But we did work a deal with the company to supply news items for its portal site. Yes, during this time, Red Hat's business model was aiming toward becoming the dominant network portal for Linux-related information. Remember, this was 1999.

• June 10, 1999: Red Hat files for its IPO. VA Linux bulks up on free software developers.

• July 1, 1999: Slashdot is acquired by Andover.net. Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman feud over "open source."

• July 22, 1999: Red Hat gives Linux hackers an opportunity to buy pre-IPO stock.

• August 12, 1999: Red Hat goes public, with great success. Andover acquires Freshmeat.net. The second LinuxWorld conference is held.

The Red Hat IPO was the beginning of a new phase: clearly somebody was making a lot of money from Linux, even if who wasn't exactly clear. What was clear is that Eklektix was not on the list. When we planned out the training offering, we had a set of spreadsheets with some truly wonderful numbers on the income which was sure to result. Somehow reality failed to match the spreadsheets. So we came to realize that we needed to look in other directions.

At this time, advertising was beginning to bring in some actual money. But, more to the point, as the market heated up, companies were showing increasing amounts of interest in anybody who had any sort of Linux credibility or mindshare. We had some of that credibility at that time. So we decided to see what would happen if we let the word out that LWN was for sale. Suffice to say that the result was a far wilder ride than we could have ever anticipated. But that will be the topic of next week's installment.

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(Log in to post comments)

seconded!  LWN is a great resource; it's pretty amazing to think it's almost 10 years old.

Thirded!

I'm really glad LWN is still around, it's definitely my favorite news source for all things
Linux.

Knowledgeable, professional and inspired are words that come to mind.

The lack of spiffy design?
Well, to me at least, that has kind of become a sign of quality... :) Content and usability
really is what matters after all.

Agreed. LWN -- oldskool colour theme and all -- been a consistently enjoyable place to read
sane, clear, balanced and interesting reporting on  a community with habitually narrow views
and and a tendency to flame. Just upgraded: please keep the lights on!

Just wait - at some point, this oldschool theme and all will be hip and modern again! :D

Thanks a lot for providing LWN - as many others have stated - this is my primary source for
Linux news, the quality is unsurpassed and it is always interesting to read what bothers the
grumpy editor ;)

Very simple and effective! LWN is my best source of Linux news. Keep it up!

Right! But, since it seems it's more than news here, also about understanding, and even
more... Actually, hard to say what it really is... So my opinion is probably too simplistic,
sorry(?):

LWN is the best web site!

Happy Birthday LWN!

(FYI: wikipedia is #2)

Congratulations on reaching 10 years.  

I hadn't realized that I had been reading LWN for that long.  In mid-1998 I started on a
project that was going to use Linux and found LWN as a source of information.  The project
didn't happen but I kept reading LWN.  I remember my panic when you announced you were going
to shut down; that led to LWN becoming the first (and still one of the very few) sites that I
am willing to pay for access to.

LWN is a special resource, keep up the good work.  I'm looking forward to the 20th
anniversary.

 

Thanks and Congratulations! Think I've been hitting lwn weekly since sometimes in '98, after I
found a link on Linuxtoday.com. quite a flashback to have a look at the old pages with the
original layout :-)

M.

If Liz happens to be reading this I just want to say, one last "thanks!" for the energy,
excitement, and depth you put into the Distributions page in the early years.

I still have fond memories of going out for ice cream with the LWN crew during an early
LinuxWorld.

How *blindly* smart" or perhaps how *blindingly*?

[Feel free to delete this comment after fixing the typo, if, indeed that
is what y'all choose to do].

JimD

It didn't read as a typo to me. It read as blindly hitting the right mark.
Separately, congratulations and thanks to LWN on being here all this time. As an interested
Linux user only, and not a developer of anything, I have long found LWN to be my first read
news resource nearly every day. I usually check back several times each day. This is an
excellent news site for all readers, and by any standard.
Especially Jon, but thank you all who write or have written for this wonderful journal that
keeps me informed about my favorite operating system.
I, too just upgraded to block the annoying ads. Ya gotta make money, I understand.

Wonderful reading all this stuff.  I had to task my local list for details on some of the
debian details--we had fun!
 
BTW, this part stops at august of 1999, but there isn't even one mention of y2k!  I was there,
sort of remember--foggy as it is now. . . :)
 
 
Thanks for the ride Jon.  WALSTIB.

regards

This is actually a comment on the "bigpage" version of the weekly edition, not on this
article.  I'm only posting it here because there is no place to put comments on the entire
weekly edition.

The problem I am seeing is that the "bigpage" version of the weekly edition no longer fits
within the margins.  I have to lower the font size two notches (pressing Control-minus twice
in Firefox) to get it to fit.  It was working last week.  What change did you make that broke
this?

Joe

it looks like the large table in the RCU article is to blame (editors sometimes have screens
that are too large for their own good and don't catch things like this, after all it fits on
their 1600x1280 (or better :-) screen)

well, I've got two laptops, my two year old thinkpad has a 1024x768 screen and I could barely
fit the image in if I did printable mode to strip out the left column.

and I only managed it on my thinkpad becouse I use a relativly small (and ugly) font, if I
enlarged it a notch or so to use a much cleaner font it wouldn't fit.

but my two week old OLPC is only about 800x600 in color mode, so it wouldn't have a chance.

many of the cheaper projectors only do 800x600 cleanly, and going to 1024x768 comes close to
doubling the price.

sites should be designed to be readable on smaller screens, just like programmers still want
you to write code to fit in 80 columns, people sometimes want to use their larger screens for
other reasons (see multiple things at the same time or to use nicer fonts that eat pixels)

I think you're missing the point.  The text should always automatically adjust to the font
size and available width.  A column of text should never be wider than the screen, because
then you have to scroll back and forth horizontally to read each line.  (I personally don't
mind if the overall layout is larger than the screen as long as the text column fits within
the screen width.)  Some people with poor vision do not have the option of using a smaller
font, so it is also an accessibility issue.

Joe

Happy birthday !

You know you're getting old when:

You remember the writeup about the "Halloween memo", and it doesn't seem very long ago at all.

Has it really been 10 years?  I had no idea.  Congrats, and thank you both very much for all
of the hard work and excellent reporting.  I can't wait to see how the next 10 years go.

A fabulous article. I'm really looking forward to the next instalment.

Those who dealt with Red Hat in that era know that, as a company, it was a rather chaotic
place. The marketing for the support partners never happened, and the backup services for the
support plans the partners were able to sell themselves were, shall we say, less than the
customers thought they deserved given what they had paid. The support partner program was not
a big success for anybody involved.

As a result, one of the first things Red Hat did with its new pile of cash was to cancel this
program and start building its own, internal support operation. Eklektix continued to push its
own support offerings for a while, but the fact of the matter is that it was not a fun
business: it seemed to mostly consist of cleaning up after low-budget ISPs which could not be
bothered to install security updates.

--------

I wanted to just say sorry about the cancelation of the Red Hat partner program in 1998. No
one inside of Red Hat support wanted to do it, but we had to face the numbers that we were not
delivering our promises and we weren't going to be able to soon. The program had been a
chaotic mess on our side and while I learned a lot from it.. it was as ugly on the inside as
what it did to our partners. It wasn't until years after I left the 24/7 work I was doing at
Red Hat that I saw how poorly communicated the problems and reasons for the decision were
done... so here is my belated apology.