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Happy 25th Birthday, Debian!

It's been 25 years since the Debian Project was founded

Aug 16, 2018 20:30 GMT  ·  By
Debian turns 25!
   Debian turns 25!

Today, August 16, 2018, the Debian Project celebrates its 25th anniversary since the late Ian Murdock announced the Debian Linux Release, which is now known as the Debian Project.

It's been 25 years since the late Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian project, send his famous email to the comp.os.linux.development mailing list announcing that he is working on a new release and was looking for suggestions. He called it the Debian Linux Release, which was put together from scratch by the Linux software developer, though it was inspired by Softlanding Linux System (SLS).

"When the late Ian Murdock announced 25 years ago in comp.os.linux.development, "the imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release, [...] the Debian Linux Release", nobody would have expected the "Debian Linux Release" to become what's nowadays known as the Debian Project, one of the largest and most influential free software projects," said Ana Guerrero Lopez.

Happy 25th birthday, Debian!

Now, 25 years later, the Debian GNU/Linux operating system is used by millions of computer users worldwide and supported on more than ten architectures. It's one of the most acclaimed and popular Linux-based OS for personal computers and servers alike, on which some of the world's most popular Linux OSes are based on Debian, including Ubuntu. Even Apple and Google adopted Debian's .deb file format.

The latest release, Debian GNU/Linux 9.5 "Stretch," was launched in mid-July 2018 and brought no less than 100 security updates and 91 miscellaneous bugfixes. Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" is the latest stable series of the operating system, released last year on June 17th and supported for three years, until July 2020. After that, it will receive an extra two years of Debian LTS support.

On this special occasion, we'd like to wish the Debian Project and all the people behind it happy anniversary, and we can't wait to get our hands on the next major release of the operating system, Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster," which is expected to land in mid-2019. Until then, the Softpedia editorial team wishes you all a happy Debian Day today if you're celebrating the 25th anniversary of Debian.