Debian Community celebrates its 19th birthday

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The Debian Project                                http://www.debian.org/
Debian Community celebrates its 19th birthday     [email protected]
August 16th, 2012               http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120816
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The Debian community is pleased to celebrate its 19th birthday since
Ian Murdock's original founding announcement [1]. Quoting from the
official project history [2]: "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://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.development/msg/a32d4e2ef3bcdcc6
   2 : http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-intro.en.html

A lot has happened to the project and its community in the past
nineteen years. There have been eleven releases - most recently Debian
6.0 "Squeeze" [3] in February 2011 - and a huge amount of free software
packaged. The current "unstable" branch consists of more than 37,000
binary packages for the amd64 architecture alone - over 46 GB of
Free/Libre Software! Since last year's birthday new steps to
portability have been made; 11 official ports [4] are now available,
amongst which Debian/kFreeBSD deserves a special mention for
successfully integrating a non-Linux kernel within the project.

   3 : http://www.debian.org/News/2011/20110205a
   4 : http://www.debian.org/ports/

Debian 7.0, codenamed Wheezy, was frozen in July 2012, following a
time-based freeze policy, and currently the main activity throughout
the project is squashing the remaining RC bugs. Again, Debian will
strive to maintain its goals of technical excellence, accountability,
and above all, freedom.

This has been made possible by the efforts of the strong community
developed around Debian. Besides more than 1,000 Debian Developers and
Maintainers from all over the globe, there are in excess of 12,000
registered accounts for the Alioth collaboration platform [5], and that
doesn't even include all those people contributing with
translations [6] or bug reports [7] (and sometimes patches for them)
and all those users helping others via our mailing lists [8],
forums [9] and IRC channels [10].

   5 : http://alioth.debian.org/
   6 : http://i18n.debian.org/
   7 : http://www.debian.org/Bugs/
   8 : http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/
   9 : http://forums.debian.net/
   10 : http://wiki.debian.org/IRC/

As a project, we would also like to take this opportunity to thank all
our users and contributors, and of course our upstream developers. All
of them are helping to make Debian a great experience and a great
project!

The Debian Project continues to welcome contributions [11] in all
forms, from everyone, encouraging people to download, use, modify and
distribute its source code hoping that it will prove useful.

   11 : http://www.debian.org/intro/help


Contact Information
-------------------

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at
http://www.debian.org/ [12] or send mail to <[email protected]>.

   12 : http://www.debian.org/

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