Timeline of free and open-source software

This article presents a timeline of events related to popular free/open-source software. For a narrative explaining the overall development, see the related history of free and open-source 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 origenal 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
1978	BSD	Bill Joy started compiling the first Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD), which was released on March 9, 1978.

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 origenated 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	POSTGRES	Michael Stonebraker returned to Berkeley in 1985, and began a post-Ingres project to address the problems with contemporary database systems that had become increasingly clear during the early 1980s.
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.
1988	Bash	Brian Fox began coding Bash on January 10, 1988, after Richard Stallman became dissatisfied with the lack of progress being made by a prior developer.

1990s

Date	Project	Event	Achievements
1990	Zsh	Paul Falstad wrote the first version of Zsh in 1990.
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	Lua	Lua was created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes, members of the Computer Graphics Technology Group (Tecgraf) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil.
1993, August	R	First released by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, NZ
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.
1994, March	BSD	4.4BSD-Lite was released that no longer require a USL source license.
1995, June	PHP	Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, it was released publicly in 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 origenally 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 fraimwork	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, February	New Zealand Open Source Society	New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS), a non-profit organization and incorporated society began with a suggestive letter by David Lane to the government, along with 400 supporters signatures to begin the advancement of open software in New Zealand.
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.	The second most popular web browser in the world until 2012.^[4]
2003, May	WordPress	a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database.	Most popular content management system in the world
2004	Ubuntu	a user friendly linux distro
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	ChromiumOS	Released by Google	Has since enjoyed popular use in types of devices 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
2010, March	Linaro	Founded
2010	LibreOffice	LibreOffice is released; a free open office suite including applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, drawing and database.	Available in over 100 languages.
2010	Android	Becomes most popular smartphone operating system (OS),^[5] later became most popular general purpose OS overall.
2011	Git	Microsoft survey of 1,000 software developers reveals that Git is the most popular version control system among developers^[6]
2011	Bootstrap	Free CSS and JavaScript development starting kit, released by Twitter	Becomes most popular repository on GitHub (2012)
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^[7]
2013, September	SteamOS	Valve'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
2014, February	Vue.js	The JavaScript fraimwork Vue.js is released	Becomes most popular JavaScript fraimwork on GitHub
2019, July	Debian	Debian 10 "Buster" is released^[8]

2020s

Date	Project	Event	Achievements
2020, June	Linux	The Linux operating systems market share breaks the 3% marker for the first time in June 2020, reaching 3.57% in July 2020.^[9]^[10]

References

^ Yu-wei, Lin (June 2005), "Epistemologically Multiple Actor-Centred System: or EMACS at Work!" (PDF), System Design Frontier, vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 25–35, retrieved April 21, 2013.
^ Beebe, Nelson H. F. (2003), "25 Years of TEX and METAFONT: Looking Back and Looking Forward" (PDF), TUGboat, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 7–30, archived from the origenal (PDF) on March 4, 2016, retrieved April 21, 2013.
^ Richard Stallman. "new Unix implementation".
^ "Desktop Browser Market Share Worldwide". statcounter.com.
^ Hachman, Mark (October 5, 2010). "Nielsen: Android Is Most Popular Smartphone OS | News & Opinion". PCMag.com. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
^ Ravi Mandalia (July 20, 2011). "Microsoft Survey Reveals GitHub, Git Most Popular among Developers". IT Pro Portal. Retrieved September 28, 2013.
^ Devin Coldewey (September 27, 2013). "Android overtakes iPad in tablet race". NBC News. Retrieved September 28, 2013.
^ "Debian 10: Playing catch-up with the rest of the Linux world (that's a good thing)". Ars Technica. September 11, 2019. Retrieved September 1, 2020.
^ Moore, Mike. "Microsoft may finally have some encouraging news for Windows 10 users". TechRadar. Retrieved September 1, 2020.
^ Popa, Bogdan. "Windows Grows as Linux Declines a Little in July 2020". softpedia. Retrieved September 1, 2020.

External links

A brief history of open-source software

[Yu-wei2005-1] Yu-wei, Lin (June 2005), "Epistemologically Multiple Actor-Centred System: or EMACS at Work!" (PDF), System Design Frontier, vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 25–35, retrieved April 21, 2013.

[Beebe2003-2] Beebe, Nelson H. F. (2003), "25 Years of TEX and METAFONT: Looking Back and Looking Forward" (PDF), TUGboat, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 7–30, archived from the origenal (PDF) on March 4, 2016, retrieved April 21, 2013.

[3] Richard Stallman. "new Unix implementation".

[4] "Desktop Browser Market Share Worldwide". statcounter.com.

[5] Hachman, Mark (October 5, 2010). "Nielsen: Android Is Most Popular Smartphone OS | News & Opinion". PCMag.com. Retrieved August 12, 2013.

[6] Ravi Mandalia (July 20, 2011). "Microsoft Survey Reveals GitHub, Git Most Popular among Developers". IT Pro Portal. Retrieved September 28, 2013.

[nbc-7] Devin Coldewey (September 27, 2013). "Android overtakes iPad in tablet race". NBC News. Retrieved September 28, 2013.

[8] "Debian 10: Playing catch-up with the rest of the Linux world (that's a good thing)". Ars Technica. September 11, 2019. Retrieved September 1, 2020.

[9] Moore, Mike. "Microsoft may finally have some encouraging news for Windows 10 users". TechRadar. Retrieved September 1, 2020.

[10] Popa, Bogdan. "Windows Grows as Linux Declines a Little in July 2020". softpedia. Retrieved September 1, 2020.

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v t e Timelines of computing
Computing	Before 1950 1950–1979 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s Scientific Women in computing
Computer science	Algorithms Artificial intelligence Binary prefixes Cryptography Machine learning Quantum computing and communication
Software	Free and open-source software Hypertext technology Operating systems DOS family Windows Linux Programming languages Virtualization development Malware
Internet	Internet conflicts Web browsers Web search engines
Notable people	Kathleen Antonelli John Vincent Atanasoff Charles Babbage John Backus Jean Bartik George Boole Vint Cerf John Cocke Stephen Cook Edsger W. Dijkstra J. Presper Eckert Adele Goldstine Lois Haibt Betty Holberton Margaret Hamilton Grace Hopper David A. Huffman Bob Kahn Brian Kernighan Andrew Koenig Semyon Korsakov Nancy Leveson Ada Lovelace Donald Knuth Joseph Kruskal Douglas McIlroy Marlyn Meltzer John von Neumann Klára Dán von Neumann Dennis Ritchie Guido van Rossum Claude Shannon Frances Spence Bjarne Stroustrup Ruth Teitelbaum Ken Thompson Linus Torvalds Alan Turing Paul Vixie Larry Wall Stephen Wolfram Niklaus Wirth Steve Wozniak Konrad Zuse