Debian Celebrates 17 Years

Alexander Reichle-Schmel announces Debian's 17^th birthday.

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's a copy of the Debian Newsletter announcing Debian's 17^th birthday.

Debian is considered by many to be the Grand-Daddy/Mommy of many of today's most popular Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu. – A Grand-Daddy at 17, go figure...

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The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
Debian celebrates its 17th birthday press@debian.org
August 16th, 2010 http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100816
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Debian celebrates its 17th birthday

The Debian Project is pleased to mark the 17th anniversary of its start.
As the official project history states [1]: "The Debian Project was
officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time,
the whole concept of a 'distribution' of Linux was new. Ian intended
Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of
Linux and GNU".

1: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-intro

Over the last seventeen years Debian has grown significantly. Initiated
as a small project with just a handful of developers it now has more
than 1000 contributors from many corners of the globe. Documentation has
been written in numerous languages, and it now has tens of thousands of
software packages, all following the Debian Free Software Guidelines
[2].

2: http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

Thanks to the contributions of individual developers, translators,
graphic designers, system administrators, users and many others, Debian
continues to thrive in the wider Free Software ecosystem. Debian is
used by a number of "derivative" distributions that further expand the
reach of Debian's software and Debian's philosophy of putting the user
first.

Under the auspices of Software In the Public Interest [3] and through
the Debian Partners program [4] Debian continues to work with some of
the largest names in hardware and software development. Debian has
always striven to support a broad range of hardware with high-quality,
well tested software and continues to work with numerous partners in
various industries to do so. Debian is also widely used in the
computational and engineering disciplines in areas such as astronomy,
bioinformatics, and physics.

3: http://www.spi-inc.org/about-spi
4: http://www.debian.org/partners/

The Debian Project continues to welcome contributions in all forms, from
users to developers, encouraging people to download, use, modify, and
distribute its source code in the hopes that it is useful. The project
will release Debian 6.0, code named "Squeeze", at some point this year
once the hard work of fixing release critical bugs is finished. In the
spirit of the Free Software community, Debian welcomes everyone to
participate in this and all of Debian's activities and looks forward to
the next seventeen years.

Debian users are invited to use http://thank.debian.net/ to express
their gratitude and submitt congratulations.