Today is Debian's Birthday, and for a while I've wanted to do something special on this date. In order to raise the general motivation of the project, have a special day when everyone is invited to thank those that make our lives easier.

November 21 was the seventh anniversary of MEPIS Linux, so it seems fitting that Warren Woodford has uploaded SimplyMEPIS 8.4.80, the alpha release of MEPIS 8.5.

Nine years ago today, Oct 13th, OpenOffice.org was called into being. It has been a pretty successful 9 years, with OOo having achieved approx 10% market share and even more in certain segments and countries.

It was about 16 years ago that Ian Murdock came upon the idea to design a new Linux distro. He named it Debian after Debra and Ian.

15 years ago, on March 1994, Linux kernel version 1.0.0 was humbly released for the world to tinker with. To celebrate the historic moment, I have collected some really interesting facts about the Linux kernel.

Today, eight years ago, Drupal 1.0.0 was released! The following snippet is taken directly from the original announcement...

"Few people had access to computers back when Richard Matthew Stallman realized the then-nascent software industry was adopting a business model based on denying software users their four essential freedoms, and that he could do something about it.

"A celebration of the 50th anniversary of Lisp is taking place in October at OOPSLA 2008. John McCarthy will give a talk about the early history of Lisp..."