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." Source