Debian celebrates 25th birthday

It’s been twenty-five years since Ian Murdock announced at comp.os.linux.development that a new Linux distro was on the way. That release evolved into the Debian Project. It is one of the oldest Linux releases.

Then-student Murdock announced on August 16, 1993 that the release of what he called Debian Linux Release was near, but that it could be several weeks before the software was ready. Debian 0.01 finally appeared on September 15, 1993. It took until 1996 for the first stable release to follow.

There has never been an official 1.0 release. In 1996, Infomagic accidentally released a developer version as 1.0, after which release 1.1 appeared to avoid ambiguity. That release also marked the first to use Toy Story names for the versions, recalls ITFoss.

The name Debian is a contraction of the first names Ian and Debra. Debra Lynn was Murdock’s girlfriend at the time. He led the project until March 1996. The basic principles of Debian are laid down in the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines. In addition, there is the Constitution, which contains the structure of the project, and the Code of Conduct, with rules of conduct.

In 2018, the project is a large and vibrant organization with a large number of self-organizing teams of volunteers and the software is used for airport systems, car entertainment, cloud servers, web hosting and internet-of-things, said Ana Guerrero Lopez, developer and member from the Debian Publicity Team.