by Robin Miller – Baltimore, MD – I am writing this live, just after midnight on Jan 1, 2001, at a gathering of programmers, sysadmins, and other geeks whose heroic efforts have managed to stave off the potentially world-crushing Y2.001K bug, or “Millenium bug,” which threatened to bring down the Internet and most of the world’s finance infrastructure as the world clicked over into the second thousand years of the Christian calendar.The gathering was organized by Jon Lasser, author of the book Think Unix, and his wife, Kathleen Ellis, maintainer of The Privacy Page. Here, at a slightly down-at-the-heels mansion in the heart of a city innocently celebrating New Year’s Eve with fireworks and noisemakers, concern about more serious matters have dominated all conversation.

Lasser says he “spent far more on this gathering than he spent on Y2K remedation,” which shows how seriously he took the Y2.001K warnings. In a possible excess of preparation, he even had a Baltimore County paramedic on hand, not to mention a keg of beer and plenty of wine and liquor.

The paramedic was off-duty (some said he was there primarily for the beer), but the wine and liquor bottles were certainly on duty and pouring as hard as they could. This activity seemed to be a major part of the planned defense against the dread potential worldwide computer disaster.

The gentleman selected to be Reader’s Digest European of the Year for 2000 is none other than Linus Benedict Torvalds.

LinuxOrbit reflects on the changes to the Linux desktop experience indepth over the course of the year 2000. “Another year peels off the calendar, and it becomes time to reflect upon the year gone by. This year was an interesting year for Linux desktop aficionados. The release of KDE 2.0 was seen as a huge leap forward in desktop environments.“

“Linux Orbit editor-in-chief John Gowin contacted Helix Code to catch up on where their products and projects were heading in the New Year. Miguel de Icaza, GNOME evangelist and developer and Helix Code co-founder was kind enough to answer our ten question interview.”
Slashdot
has the story.

– By Grant Gross –

The year 2000 may very well be remembered as the year
when Open Source stocks took a dive, while major
technology vendors embraced Open Source products such
as Linux. A handful of year-end stories focusing on
anything Open Source mention the dismal stock
performances of the leading companies in the sector,
including Red Hat and VA Linux. (Our often-used
disclosure: VA Linux owns this very Web site.)

A Motley
Fool article counted the two big Linux companies
among 2000’s top 10 stock losers, while SearchEnterpiseLinux
focused on “marriages” between major vendors such
as IBM and Hewlett-Packard and Linux.

A LinuxWorld
story proclaimed 2000 as a “very good year,” with
Sun Microsystems Open-Sourcing Star Office and
Japanese retailer Lawson purchasing 15,000 IBM
machines with Linux installed.

Upside
Today took a comprehensive look at the year for
Open Source, with a two-part month-by-month chronicle
of Open Source news. It’s quite exhaustive.

More of a Christmas feature than a year-end one, but a
roundup nonetheless, Canada
Computes looked at Open Source games available
this year.

If you’re more of a hardware geek than a game-player,
check
out ZDNet UK’s chip review. It was a big year in
the Chip Wars.

And then there’s the
tech year iin review, haiku style, from CNet.
Those crazy kids over at News.com.

New in NewsForge this week

News editor Tina Gasperson talks
with Adam Beberg, CTO of Mithral Communication &
Design, who in a recent paper, wrote that Open
Source is not a business model.

Hardware reviewer Jeff Field takes
apart the Cue:Cat scanner and looks at the Open
Source software available for it to do funky new
things.

Columnist Julie Bresnick profiles
Gerard Beekmans who Linux From Scratch, a guide to
building a Linux operating system.

The best of NewsForge

Since NewsForge launched in mid-August, we’ve had a
steady increase in readers. It’s been an exciting and
challenging year, and we look forward to bringing an
even better, more comprehensive Open Source news site
in 2001. For those of you who are recent converts to
our cause, here are some of the stories we’ve done
this year:

Gasperson interviewed
Open Source advocate Bruce Perens, just after he
was hired by Hewlett-Packard. Perens said the union
would be good for all in the Open Source community.

Field compared
the usability of Windows Whistler with Gnome, KDE, and
Mandrake Update, and found each could learn something
from the others.

Meanwhile, Gasperson argued
that Whistler might convince Windows holdouts to
finally switch to Open Source.

The director of the U.S. Patent Office told
a tech audience that his hands were tied by
Congress amid calls to tighten the kinds of
patents the office granted for software and Internet
business methods.

Two Internet veterans called
for a type of “antipatent” to counter the problem
of too many goofy patents being issued.

Business columnist Jack Bryar countered
bad stock prices by arguing that companies can make
money in Open Source. One growing sector: telecom.

Freelancer Eric Ries gave readers a sneak preview
of Richard M. Stallman’s version 3 of the GNU General
Public License. Here’s part
one and part
two.

Happy New Year, everyone.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments
posted on our discussion
page.

BSDToday has reposted a letter first appearing on Bugtraq which describes how to exploit overflows in the FreeBSD kernel. “This is a detailed case study discussing the exploitation of the FreeBSD kernel process filesystem buffer overflow vulnerability[*].”

“CSA Coventive MSC SDN BHD, a joint venture between CSA (Malaysia) BHD and Xchannel Ltd, a subsidiary of Coventive Technologies Inc, officially announced its incorporation at Linux World Malaysia 2000 event.”
The full brief is available on LinuxPR.

“UnionBuiltBox takes great pride in announcing it’s new Dual Linux Booting Computer. Now you have the choice of two Linux Distributions on one computer, with each distribution on it’s own hard drive. You select from Red Hat 7.0, Kondara MNU/Linux, SuSE 7.0 and Mandrake 7.2.
” More information is available at LinuxPR.

The question of certification on Linux was brought up over on Slashdot. “Are CTOs and managers in Linux shops actually looking for such certifications right now? And has anyone taken these certification tests before and can comment on how well they match-up to real world expectations of a Linux Administrator?“

Andre Hedrick, the maintainer of the ATA/IDE layer in the Linux Kernel, speaks out in an interview with LinuxJournal on the issue of the recent CPRM proposal.