This article presents a timeline of popular free/open-source software. For a narrative explaining the overall developments, see the related history of free software.
1980s
| Event |
|---|
| 1976 | Emacs | The original EMACS was a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor written in 1976 by Richard Stallman, initially together with Guy L. Steele, Jr.. Later in 1984 the GNU Emacs was released under a GNU General Public License. |
| 1982 | TeX | Originally written by Donald Knuth in 1978, the new version of TeX was rewritten from scratch and was published in 1982. |
| 1984 | X window system | X originated at MIT in 1984. The current protocol version, X11, appeared in September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.org Server, available as free software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses. |
| 1987 | GCC | Written by Richard Stallman with contributions from others as the C compiler for the GNU Project. Later the project would be known as the GNU Compiler Collection. |
| 1987 | Perl | Perl, the dynamic programming language was created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. |
1990s
| Event |
|---|
| 1991 | Linux Kernel | Started by Linus Torvalds, Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it would grow from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to its state in 2007 of about 290 megabytes of source under the GNU General Public License. |
| 1991 | Python | First released by Guido Van Rossum in 1991. |
| 1992 | 386BSD | 386BSD was written mainly by Berkeley alumni Lynne Jolitz and William Jolitz. The 386BSD releases made to the public beginning in 1992. |
| 1992 | Samba | Andrew Tridgell developed the first version of Samba in 1992, at the Australian National University. |
| 1993, March | NetBSD | The project began as a result of frustration within the 386BSD developer community with the pace and direction of the operating system's development. The four founders of the NetBSD project were Chris Demetriou, Theo de Raadt, Adam Glass and Charles Hannum. |
| 1993, Dec | FreeBSD | FreeBSD's development began in 1993 with a quickly growing, unofficial patchkit maintained by users of the 386BSD operating system.The first official release was FreeBSD 1.0 in December 1993. |
| 1993 | Wine | Bob Amstadt (the initial project leader) and Eric Youngdale started the project in 1993 as a way to run Windows applications on Linux. |
| 1995, June | PHP | Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, it was released publicly on June 1995. |
| 1995 | GIMP | Created by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, the project originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program. |
| 1995 | Ruby | Created by Yukihiro Matsumoto, the programming language drew greater attention in the 2000s due to the Ruby on Rails web development framework |
| 1996 | Apache | The first version of the Apache web server was created by Robert McCool, who was heavily involved with the NCSA web server, known simply as NCSA HTTPd. |
| 1996 | KDE | KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. |
| 1997, August | GNOME | The initial project leaders for GNOME were Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena. |
| 1999, August | OpenOffice.org | Originally developed as the proprietary software application suite StarOffice by the German company StarDivision, the code was purchased in 1999 by Sun Microsystems. The code was made available free of charge in August 1999. On July 19, 2000, Sun Microsystems announced that it was making the source code of StarOffice available for download under both the LGPL and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) |
2000s
| Event |
|---|
| 2002 | MediaWiki | There was no name for the project, until the Wikimedia Foundation was announced in June 2003, when name MediaWiki was coined by a Wikipedia contributor. |
| 2003, April | Firefox | Descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, the project started as an experimental branch of the Mozilla Project. Originally titled Phoenix, then renamed as Firebird, the project was finally named Mozilla Firefox. The version 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. |
By the 2000s the number of open source software packages in wide use was so large that it would be infeasible to make a definitive list.
See also
External links
