Fifteen years of Debian
When Ian Murdock created the Debian project on 16 August 1993, the Linux kernel itself was barely two years old. There were early distributions already, of course, Slackware being the only one of them to survive, but those were systems produced by firms or by individual developers. Murdock had a different vision; one principle of Debian is that it was intended from the start to be an open project that anyone could help work on – a Linux by the user for the user, growing in the same way as the free software it contains. A second principle behind the Debian platform is that the distribution is made up of exclusively of free software. The name is a combination of Murdock's first name and that of his wife, Debra.
Release 0.9R6 appeared in the autumn of 1995, when the development team numbered fifty people among them Bruce Perens who later led the team for many years, and was the first version suitable for everyone to use. New versions, each bearing the name of a character from the film Toy Story, have been appearing regularly since then. The current version is 4.0r4, the fourth update of Debian "Etch" Version 4.0 that appeared in April 2007, which thanks to an updated kernel to improve hardware support was named ""Etch-and-a-half". The next release, 5.0 ("Lenny"), is expected in September.
