What open source milestones would you commemorate on the technology calendar?

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by Dafne Cholet. CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

Infamous hacker zine 2600—champion of freedom, transparency, and the technophile's playful spirit—has announced that it's begun compiling the hacker calendar, which will commemorate important anniversaries in technological culture.

(Of course, the zine is using the term "hacker" the way it has for decades: to denote those who, through imagination and experimentation, push any technology beyond its preconceived limitations. See this TechRepublic article for a discussion of the term "hacker" vs. "cracker.")

Magazine co-founder and editor Emmanuel Goldstein explains that while the 2012 calendar will feature photographs of technology "old and new ... large and small" (and there's no doubt a few telephones will grace its pages), it will also treat milestones—the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for instance, or the release of cult film "War Games"—like holidays deserving celebration and remembrance.

2600 is relying on readers to suggest the holidays highlighted each month. It's a perfect opportunity to ensure that important moments in open source history get the recognition they deserve.

In the comments, detail your favorite moments in open source history. Next week, we'll collect all your responses and submit them to 2600 for inclusion in the calendar. Remember: a 2012 calendar may be the last you ever need. Let's help make this one memorable.

Update (August 12, 2011): The 2012 Hacker Calendar has been released!

Bryan Behrenshausen
Bryan formerly managed the Open Organization section of Opensource.com, which features stories about the ways open values and principles are changing how we think about organizational culture and design. He's worked on Opensource.com since 2011. Find him online as semioticrobotic.

8 Comments

Let's get started!

July 4, 1971: First electronic text becomes available on Project Gutenberg
(That text was <em>The United States Declaration of Independence</em>.)

May 27, 1997: Eric Raymond first delivers "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
(He did so at Linux Kongress in Würzburg, Germany.)

September 27th 1983: Annoyed by a printer that couldn't be fixed because the source code was withheld, Richard Stallman at MIT, launched the GNU Project to develop "a sufficient body of free software [...] to get along without any software that is not free."

I looked everywhere for that date! Where did you find it?

That's the date it was announced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project

Ah! I spent most of my time looking for the precise publication date of GPL v. 1.0, and missed this one completely.

It seems a little difficult to find out _the_day_.
...and I just remember I did some:
http://minix-up.sourceforge.jp/timeline/

e.g.
2002-01-30: The joint revision to, POSIX(R) and the Single UNIX(R) Specification (The Open Group)
2000-04-07: MINIX license changed ( BSD licence )
1995-10-04: OpenBSD beggining (by Theo de Raadt, NetBSD Project)
1995-07-18: "Heads the effort to create the Plan 9 operating system" (Dennis Ritchie)
1994-12-20: Start creating the OpenBSD project
1993-11-01: FreeBSD 1.0 (by ??)
1993-04-21: NetBSD 0.8 (by Chris G. Demetriou, comp.os.386bsd.misc)
1992-07-14: 386BSD 0.1 (by William and Lynne Jolitz)
1992-01-29: "LINUX is obsolete"(Andy Tanenbaum, comp.os.minix)
1991-10-05: Freax 0.02 (by Linus Tobalds, comp.os.minix)
1991-09-17: The kernel version 0.01 compiled ( in minix 1.5.10 + 386 patch )
1991-08-25: Yet another free operating system for 386 (by Linus Benedict Torvalds, University of Helsinki, comp.os.minix)
1991-07-03: Working in minix, for a project (by Linus Benedict Torvalds)
1978-03-09: 1BSD(Berkeley Software Distribution) ( by ?? , UCB )
1971-11-03: UNIX 1st Edition (v1, Bell Labs)

May the timezone be with you!

You've done a lot of great work here. Thanks, heno!

Just updated this piece to report that the calendar <a href="http://store.2600.com/the-hacker-calendar1.html">has been released!</a>

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