What 2020 left open source

Continuing with this series of publications related to the collection of events most important events that occurred in the past year in relation to Linux and open source. This time let's recap the most important events of the past year in relation to open source.

And is that inside of the most famous events over the past year, we can remember the Lawsuit that GNOME received from Rothschild Patent Imaging, as well as the move towards inclusive terminology in many projects, the change from CentOS to CentOS stream, among other things.

Started by the most famous events, we can remember changing the use of the master name for the main branch in git repositories and renaming of politically incorrect terms (master, slave, blacklist, whitelist) in code: Linux kernel, LLVM, Go, OpenZFS, Bitbucket, Git, Firefox, Fedora, among others.

Another event that gave a lot to talk about was blocking youtube-dl and Popcorn repositories Time on Github, in which Popcorn Time did not have much to do, while the battle that youtube-dl led marked an important event and in the end GitHub has approved the changes to remove unreasonable crashes.

youtube-dl
Related article:
Another one falls on GitHub, now it's the turn of youtube-dl

On the other hand, we can also remember an event that is still recent and is the CentOS project change, which led to a decision to discontinue maintenance of CentOS 8 and to turn the CentOS project into a testing ground for developing RHEL versions.

Another conflict that arose in relation to a Linux distribution was that of the founder of Void Linux who I quit the project due to internal problems among the developers and is that his resignation resulted in some conflicts arising with which the founder of Void Linux simply exploded and also caused an internal fight, although in the end he returned to the project.

Related article:
Void Linux founder leaves project due to internal problems

Nor can we forget mass layoffs, collapse of projects and services (Firefox Send, Firefox Notes) in Mozilla, as well as the release to the community of the Mozilla WebThings, Servo and Rust projects and also the transfer of the Thunderbird development to a separate company MZLA Technologies Corporation.

Furthermore, we cannot forget the patent lawsuit against GNOME by Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC against them.

Lawsuit filed patent infringement 9,936,086 in Shotwell photo manager. The Gnome Foundation has already hired an attorney and intends to decisively defend itself against the unfounded charge. In the end the lawsuit did not proceed and Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC learned a lesson the hard way.

Gnome sued
Related article:
The Gnome Foundation was sued by Rothschild Patent Imaging

And it is that also touching the subject of lawsuits, we can remember the dispute over Rambler's rights over Nginx continues in a US court. All this I know because the Nginx creator was working for him at the time he wrote the code web server source, something that Igor Sysoev has never denied. This issue led to a raid on Nginx facilities Inc. in Moscow by the Russian police, in which several employees were arrested and made available for later questioning.

_Rambler vs. NGINX
Related article:
Rambler's lawsuit against NGINX is invalid and he also has a lawsuit against Twitch

Additionally, during 2020, the election of the new president of the Free Open Source Foundation was announced. after the departure of this charge by Richard Stallman following accusations of unworthy behavior from the leader of the SPO movement and threats to break up with some of the open source software communities and organizations.

Ehe new president and head of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is Geoffrey Knauth, who for more than 30 years has served on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation since 1998 and has been a member of the GNU Project since 1985.

On the other hand, the Open Source Foundation announced that it plans to launch a new platform for joint development and code hosting.

FSF
Related article:
FSF plans to launch public code hosting and collaboration platform

As for the different applications and open source projects, the following stand out:

  • The development of a fork of the CUPS printing system
  • The new PAPPL framework for organizing print output
  • Migration from KDE and Xfce to GitLab.
  • Support for creating Linux desktop applications on Flutter.
  • KDE plasma big screen setup for televisions.
  • Renamed environment from Unity8 to Lomiri.
  • The GNOME Circle Initiative

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