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【正文】 him from posting information on the Inter that contained cryptographic example code. Most critical in the ruling: ``Because puter source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas about puter programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment.’’ Andy Tanenbaum releases the the Minix operating system under the BSD license. Had Minix been open source from the beginning, Linux may never have happened. May 20xx SuSE releases the first supported Linux distribution for the IBM S/390 mainframe. ``Approximately 140 distribution panies exist across the globe. We believe all but the top five will be bought, will go out of business or will be relegated to insignificance. Marketshare leaders are currently defined around geographic boundaries. Red Hat has the largest global brand recognition and leading North American market share。 SuSE leads in Europe, Turbolinux leads in Asia, and Conectiva leads in South America.’’Keith Bachman, an analyst for WR Hambrecht, predicting in The Red Herring June 20xx Commercial considerations help prompt the relicensing of MySQL under the GPL. Now the two freely available databases that are widely used in the Linux and Free Software munities, PostgreSQL and MySQL, meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Guidelines. In addition, Progress Software forms a new pany, NuSphere, just for the purpose of supporting MySQL. July 20xx ``In a world of NDAbound business agreements, Debian is an open book. In a world of mission statements, Debian has a social contract. At a time when mercial distributors are striving to see how much proprietary software they can pack into a box of Linux, Debian remains the bastion of software freedomliving proof that you can have a fully functional and usable operating system without needing any proprietary code.’’Evan Leibovitch, ZDNet Sun announces that StarOffice is to be released under the GPL. The code is going to be reworked, integrated with Bonobo and GTK, and released as a set of reusable ponents. StarOffice will also be reworked to use a set of open XMLbased file formats. Oracle’s Linuxbased inter appliance system hits the shelves. The ``New Inter Computer’’ (NIC) is the latest result of Larry Ellison’s long personal crusade to make nonMicrosoft systems available to the world. It’s aimed at people who only want access to the Net。 as such, it’s essentially a $199 (without monitor) X terminal. Reports first appear that SCO may be purchased by Caldera. Later in 20xx Caldera and SCO announce their intent for Caldera International to be formed from Caldera’s existing operation and two of SCO’s three divisions. Ted Ts’o steps forward to bee the new status list maintainer. Alan Cox was doing the job until he said that it was time to ``find someone else to maintain it’’. Ted Ts’o responded to Linus’ subsequent call for a new status list maintainer. August 20xx HP, Intel, IBM and NEC announce the ``Open Source Development Lab’’, which makes large hardware available to Linux developers for benchmarking and testing. September 20xx ``I’m a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think otherwise. Yet they do. People think I’m a nice guy, and the fact is that I’m a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn’t care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work if it just results in what I consider to be a better system.’’Linus Torvalds trying to change his image. The RSA patent expires, allowing for secure web transactions without proprietary software. Trolltech releases the Qt library under the GPL, putting a definitive end to a longrunning and unpleasant license flame war. The CueCat fiasco begins. Digital Convergence attempts to shut down programmers who have written Linux drivers for its CueCat bar code scanner. The pany has given out large numbers of these scanners for free, expecting people to use them with its proprietary software and web site. The threats cause the drivers to bee marginally harder to find for a short period, after which the pany declares victory and moves on. October 20xx Microsoft says that penguins can mutate in a European print ad that quickly bees famous. December 20xx ``I was dumbfounded to discover that installing Linux was easy. Why? Well, the world has changed. No more do you have to understand everything about Linux before you install it, downloading the many chunks of code necessary to run a plete system and getting them all to work together. That was BSWbefore shrinkwrap. With panies such as Red Hat and Corel putting all the software you need in a box, the pain is (nearly) gone.’’John Schwartz, Washington Post IBM announces plans to invest $1 billion in Linux in 20xx. January 20xx The longawaited kernel was released on January 4. The US National Security Agency (NSA) releases SELinux under the GPL. SELinux offers an additional layer of security checks in addition to the standard UNIXlike permissions system. March 20xx The Linux kernel summit is held in San Jose, California。 it is, perhaps, the most plete gathering of Linux kernel hackers in history. April 20xx IBM gets into trouble over its ``Peace, Love and Linux’’ graffiti in several cities. ``Slackware has always made money (who else producing a mercial distribution can say that?), but with BSDi we ended up strapped to a sinking ship.’’Patrick Volkerding May 20xx Sony’s PlayStation Linux kit, shipped in Japan, sells out in eight minutes despite a doubling of the available stock. June 20xx Sharp announces its uping Linux PDA based on Lineo’s Embedix system. VA Linux Systems exits the hardware business, choosing to focus on SourceFe instead. Later VA drops the word ``Linux’’ from its name altogether, relaunching as VA Software Corporation. ``In a press release issued Wednesday afternoon, VA Li