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As we entered the latter half of the year, the European CII directive was finally dealt the killer blow when the European Parliament decided it couldn't accept the proposed draft. For those in opposition and promoting the directive, the decision was a mixed blessing, denying both sides the legislative framework they desired, but leaving them with the current national patent law as practised in respective member states.

SCO was in for a battering, too, with the revelation that a code comparison project between Unix and Linux carried out in 1999 concluded there was 'no evidence of any copyright infringement'.

August produced the open source community's first 'patent pool'. The OSDL (remember that interview) said it would organise a central repository for software patents and patent pledges relating to open source software.

September kicked off with a survey showing Linux to be cheaper than Microsoft and Sun. However, you could have picked out such a survey showing one to be cheaper than the other for pretty much every month of the year - and still be none the wiser. The same can be said for the security arguments, making 2005 a dizzying research PR campaign trail.

Novell also launched SUSE 10.0, the first to draw on the expertise of its recently created openSUSE community.

Toward the end of October, the OSDL announced a project to push Linux in another direction with the Mobile Linux Initiative aimed at phones.

October also saw the release of OpenOffice 2.0, hot on the heels of Sun's release of StarOffice 8. The launch was significant in that it supported the Open Document Format: an open standards-based format that was gaining favour within the public sector because it did not rely on proprietary software to read it, and did not face the potential of becoming obsolete should the software vendor cease to exist.

IBM made further patent moves this month, with the announcement that it would allow software projects focused on 'open healthcare and education software standards built around web services, electronic forms and open document formats' royalty-free access to its massive patent portfolio.

In November Red Hat briefed us of its plans for virtualisation and how it could make existing datacenters far more efficient.

And Novell announced a far more visceral move, culling 10 per cent of its workforce and outlining a restructuring plan that will cost it in excess of $36m, but could save as much as $200m a year. That same month Heinrich Mantel, founder of SUSE, also quit.

On a more light-hearted note, SCO revealed it was petitioning IBM for details of its involvement with the Linux 2.7 kernel: software that doesn't even exist. Oops.

But the major news for the month was the formation of the open innovation network. Rather than some complicated donation of patents with myriad caveats, the OIN - funded by some major moneyed IT brands - has the wallet to acquire patents for use by the open source community.

Coupled with that, the OSDL set up a website that allows software developers to cut through the various disparate patent donations to search out those that are available to a particular project at one point:www.patentcommons.org.

So here we are, December, and the month kicks off with the news that the venerable GNU General Public License (GPL) is to get an update after more than 15 years.
Then Sun takes IBM's open-sourcing hardware step a stride further, by releasing the code to its recently announced UltraSPARC T1 processor.

IBM also positioned itself as the single point of contact for Linux in emerging economies when it partnered with Red Hat and Novell to resell hardware, software, subscriptions, solutions and support for the platform.

So what have we learned this year? Well, if Linux ever came of age, it's this year. It's possibly more confusing than ever to choose between open source and proprietary than it has ever been, but this has been the result from a desperate PR campaign, from both sides, to mis-foot the other. The key sea-change for this year though are the patent donations and the OIN. With enough goodwill and cash, the open source community could quickly become a patent force to be reckoned with, with a big and broad enough portfolio for potential pressers to think twice before filing. This puts any Linux seller on a level, if not better, footing with its proprietary rivals. With emerging economies fertile ground and open standards a key issue, could 2006 really be ... could it possibly be ... the year of the penguin?