Timeline of open-source software
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This article presents a timeline of events related to popular free/open-source software. For a narrative explaining the overall developments, see the related history of free software.
The Achievements column documents achievements a project attained at some point in time (not necessarily when it was first released).
1970s
| Date | Project | Event | Achievements |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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.[1] | Longest continuously-developed GNU project |
1980s
| Date | Project | Event | Achievements |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | TeX | Originally written by Donald Knuth in 1978, the new version of TeX was rewritten from scratch and was published in 1982.[2] | One of the longest continuously-developed open source projects |
| 1983, September | GNU Project | Announced by Richard Stallman on Usenet as a project to create a "Free Unix"[3] | Became the standard userland for Linux (c. 1991); USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award (2001) |
| 1984 | X window system | X originated at MIT in 1984. The current protocol version, X11, appeared in September 1987. The X.Org Foundation now leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.org Server, available as free software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses. | Most popular windowing system implementation for desktop Linux and all Unix operating systems, excluding Mac OS X |
| 1985 | Free Software Foundation | Founded by Richard Stallman to support Free Software projects and issue revisions to key software licenses, notably the GPL | Prix Ars Electronica (2005) |
| 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
| Date | Project | Event | Achievements |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. | Many, including: Most popular kernel used by top 500 supercomputers. Most popular kernel in mobile devices sold in 2013. |
| 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. | Now able to run vast numbers of Windows applications and video games |
| 1994, March | Linux Journal | First issue of the first computer magazine dedicated to Linux. | |
| 1995, June | PHP | Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, it was released publicly on June 1995. | Formed part of the most popular web development stack (LAMP) in the 1990s and 2000s |
| 1995 | GIMP | Created by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, the project originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program. | Used by Hollywood, in the forked form of CinePaint (formerly known as Film Gimp) |
| 1995 | Ruby | Created by Yukihiro Matsumoto, the programming language drew greater attention in the 2000s due to the Ruby on Rails web development framework | Became extremely popular with internet startups |
| 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. | Most popular web server |
| 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
| Date | Project | Event | Achievements |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | LLVM | Compiler toolkit, started at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Initially a research project and known as "Low-Level Virtual Machine". | Adopted by Apple as their primary compilation platform for Mac OS X |
| 2001 | Free Software Foundation Europe | Founded to support free software and oppose software patents in Europe | Theodor Heuss Medal (2010) |
| 2002 | Blender | Formerly proprietary software, released as open source in 2002 after a crowdfunding campaign | |
| 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. | Integral to the development of Wikipedia |
| 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. | Second most popular web browser in the world |
| 2005 | Git | Created by Linux founder Linus Torvalds | World's most popular distributed revision control system |
| 2008, September | Chromium | Released by Google | Forms the majority of the code in Google Chrome, the most popular web browser in the world |
| 2008 | Android | Released by Google | Most popular mobile platform in the world |
| 2009 | Chromium OS | Released by Google | Has since enjoyed popular use in types of device known as Chromebooks and Chromeboxes |
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.
2010s
| Date | Project | Event | Achievements |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 2010 | Linaro | Founded | |
| 2010 | Android | Becomes most popular smartphone operating system (OS),[4] later became most popular general purpose OS overall. | |
| 2011 | Git | Microsoft survey of 1,000 software developers reveals that Git is the most popular revision control system among developers[5] | |
| 2011 | Twitter Bootstrap | Free CSS and JavaScript development starting kit, released by Twitter | Becomes most popular repository on GitHub (2012–present) |
| 2012 | Google Chrome, based on Chromium | Overtakes Internet Explorer to become most widely used web browser, according to StatCounter | |
| 2013 | Firefox OS | Mobile phone operating system, released by Mozilla Foundation | |
| 2013 (Q2) | Android | Overtakes iOS to become most popular tablet operating system[6] | |
| 2013, September | SteamOS | Valve Corporation's new Linux-based operating system for its Steambox consoles, intended to promote Linux gaming and spread Linux adoption in the high-end video game sector |
See also
- Timeline of Linux adoption
- History of free software
- List of free software packages
- Timeline of programming languages – many programming languages are open source
- Timeline of operating systems – quite a few operating systems are open source
References
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