The Debian Project is pleased to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the announcement of the creation of Debian by Ian Murdoch. We quote the official History of the project: “The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on 16 August 1993. At that time, the concept of a distribution with Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution that was developed openly, following the spirit of Linux and GNU.”
The project and its community have been through a lot in the last 18 years. There have been 18 releases published, the most recent: Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”, in February 2011- and a great amount of free software has been packaged. The current «unstable» branch contains more than 35.000 binary packages, counting only the amd64 architecture- more than 44Gb of Free Software! Throughout its history, Debian has kept its objectives of technological excellence, responsibility and above all: freedom.
None of this would have been possible without the strong community that has developed around Debian. Besides the more than 1000 Debian Developers and Maintainers spread around the world, there are more than 11.000 registered accounts on the Alioth collaboration platform, and that without including all the people who contribute through translations or bug reports (sometimes including patches for them), and all the users who help each other through our mailing lists, forums and IRC channels.
As a project, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all our users and contributors, and of course all the developers who make the software that Debian distributes. All of them allow Debian to be a great project and a great experience.
Today, around the world, Debian Developers, Maintainers, Contributors and Users celebrate the birthday with small conferences, virtual parties, or even real life parties. It is the community who organises this celebration, and it is not too late to start one in your own city!
Users can also use the web platform at http://thank-you.debian.net to express their gratitude, and share photos of their own celebrations of the Debian birthday. If you send something through Identi.ca or Twitter, please, use the hashtag #thxdebian.
The Debian Project keeps welcoming any kind of contribution, from any person, encouraging people to download, use, modify and distribute its source code in the hope that it will be useful to everyone.