Debian Community celebrates its 18th birthday

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The Debian Project                                 http://www.debian.org/
Debian Community celebrates its 18th birthday            press <at> debian.org
July 29th, 2011                  http://www.debian.org/News/2011/20110730
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Debian Community celebrates its 18th birthday

The Debian Project is pleased to mark the 18th anniversary of Ian
Murdoch's 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 eighteen
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 35,000
binary packages for the amd64 architecture alone - over 44GB of
Free/Libre Software!  Throughout this history Debian has maintained its
goals of technical excellence, accountability, and above all freedom.

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

Of course that wouldn't be possible without the strong community which
has developed around Debian.  Besides more than 1,000 Debian Developers