When did Ubuntu evovle?

Question

I want to know when did Ubuntu first time came into existence and who made it possible?

Answer 1

First release, October 2004, "Warty Warthog".

Before that, there was a mailing list on www.nonameyet.com (IIRC) and rumours of some dotcom millionaire hiring Debian developers and then getting them to... well, work on Debian.

Its officially-unacknowledged inspiration was Bruce Perens' UserLinux project. Google him & that for more info.

Comments

Debian itself was a much deeper inspiration, really, along with the release management practices of GNOME and a number of the revision control ideas that were floating around in the Arch project, and I
expect Mark's previous commercial experience as well. I can't speak for Mark, but for those of us who were brought in early from Debian - at least a plurality of the early hires - I think I can safely generalise that our main motivation was that we'd been working on Debian for a while and shared various frustrations with the way the project operated at the time, along with a great excitement at the chance to bring it to a much wider audience.

Personally, if I had to pick a Debian-based distribution to cite as an inspiration, I'd have gone for Progeny. They produced a bunch of interesting technology and funded a lot of work on important parts of Debian while they were active, things that now seem just part of the infrastructure we expect to be there. Their mention in http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/all_this_for_a_progress_bar/ comes to mind, for example, along with an awful lot of work on X, and I'm sure a great deal else. Looking back I see quite a few similarities with Ubuntu.

Answer 2

Take a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28operating_system%29 [2]