This article presents a timeline of events related to popularfree/open-source software. For a narrative explaining the overall development, see the relatedhistory 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).
| Date | Project | Event | Achievements |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1976 | Emacs | The original EMACS was a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor written in 1976 byRichard Stallman, initially together withGuy 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. |
| Date | Project | Event | Achievements |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | TeX | Originally written byDonald 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 onUsenet as a project to create a "Free Unix"[3] | Became the standard userland forLinux (c. 1991);USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award (2001) |
| 1984 | X Window System | X originated atMIT in 1984. The current protocol version,X11, appeared in September 1987. TheX.Org Foundation now leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.org Server, available as free software under theMIT 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 byRichard 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, thedynamic programming language was created byLarry Wall and first released in 1987. | |
| 1988 | Bash | Brian Fox begancoding Bash on January 10, 1988, afterRichard Stallman became dissatisfied with the lack of progress being made by a prior developer. | |
| 1989 | BSD | Networking Release 1 (Net/1) was made available to non-licensees of AT&T code and wasfreely redistributable under the terms of theBSD license. |
| Date | Project | Event | Achievements |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | Zsh | Paul Falstad wrote the first version of Zsh in 1990. | |
| 1991 | Linux kernel | Started byLinus 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 byGuido van Rossum in 1991. | |
| 1992 | 386BSD | 386BSD was written mainly by Berkeley alumniLynne Jolitz andWilliam 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 byRoberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes, members of the Computer Graphics Technology Group (Tecgraf) at thePontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, inBrazil. | |
| 1993, August | R | First released byRoss Ihaka andRobert Gentleman at theUniversity 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 runWindows applications on Linux. | Now able to run vast numbers of Windows applications and video games |
| 1994, March | Linux Journal | First issue of the firstcomputer 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 byRasmus 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 bySpencer Kimball andPeter Mattis, the project originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program. | Used byHollywood, in theforked form ofCinePaint (formerly known as Film Gimp) |
| 1995 | Ruby | Created byYukihiro Matsumoto, the programming language drew greater attention in the 2000s due to theRuby on Rails web development framework | Became extremely popular withinternet startups |
| 1996 | Apache | The first version of the Apache web server was created byRobert McCool, who was heavily involved with theNCSA web server, known simply asNCSA HTTPd. | Most popular web server |
| 1996 | KDE | KDE was founded in 1996 byMatthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. | |
| 1997, August | GNOME | The initial project leaders for GNOME wereMiguel de Icaza andFederico Mena. | |
| 1999, August | OpenOffice.org | Originally developed as the proprietary software application suiteStarOffice by the German company StarDivision, the code was purchased in 1999 bySun 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 theSun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) |
| 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 byApple as their primary compilation platform forMac OS X |
| 2001 | Free Software Foundation Europe | Founded to support free software and opposesoftware patents in Europe | Theodor Heuss Medal (2010) |
| 2002 | Blender | Formerlyproprietary software, released as open source in 2002 after acrowdfunding 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 ofWikipedia |
| 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 theMozilla Application Suite, the project started as an experimental branch of theMozilla 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-sourcecontent management system (CMS) written inPHP and paired with aMySQL orMariaDB 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 populardistributed revision control system |
| 2008, September | Chromium | Released by Google | Forms the majority of the code inGoogle 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 asChromebooks 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.
| 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 popularsmartphone 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 | FreeCSS andJavaScript development starting kit, released byTwitter | Becomes most popular repository onGitHub (2012) |
| 2012 | Google Chrome, based on Chromium | OvertakesInternet Explorer to become most widely used web browser, according toStatCounter | |
| 2013 | Firefox OS | Mobile phone operating system, released byMozilla Foundation | |
| 2013 (Q2) | Android | OvertakesiOS to become most populartablet operating system[7] | |
| 2013, September | SteamOS | Valve's new Linux-based operating system for its Steambox consoles, intended to promoteLinux gaming and spreadLinux adoption in the high-end video game sector | |
| 2014, February | Vue.js | TheJavaScript framework Vue.js is released | Becomes most popular JavaScript framework on GitHub |
| 2019, July | Debian | Debian 10 "Buster" is released[8] |
| 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] |