InkscapeHistory

Overview

from the inkscape manpage by BryceHarrington

The codebase that would become Inkscape began life in 1999 as the program Gill, the GNOME Illustrator application, created by Raph Levien. The stated objective for Gill was to eventually support all of SVG. Raph implemented the PostScript bezier imaging model, including stroking and filling, line cap style, line join style, text, etc. Raph's Gill page is at http://www.levien.com/svg/. Work on Gill appears to have slowed or ceased in 2000.

The next incarnation of the codebase was to become the highly popular program Sodipodi, led by Lauris Kaplinski. The codebase was turned into a powerful illustration program over the course of several year's work, adding several new features, multi-lingual support, porting to Windows and other operating systems, and eliminating dependencies.

Inkscape was formed in 2003 by four active Sodipodi developers, Bryce Harrington, MenTaLguY, Nathan Hurst, and Ted Gould, wanting to take a different direction with the codebase in terms of focus on SVG compliance, interface look-and-feel, and a desire to open development opportunities to more participants.

Timeline

1998

Gill starts as an effort to implement SVG on the Gnome canvas.

Sodipodi starts as a private branch? See interview with Lauris.

1999

The SodiPodi 0.17 Changelog shows major changes on 1999-09-02.

2000

Sodipodi gets a sourceforge page, 0.17 release lists 3 authors.

2003

Inkscape forks from SodiPodi.

References

Ted's pages of "about dialogs"

Release History

This is straight off of the sourceforge pages. These raw facts are here to help spur your memory. Please add what you know in a timeline format above.

See also: release history at Wikipedia, list of past release notes.

Inkscape

2008-04-01 0.46

2007-02-05 0.45

2006-06-25 0.44

2005-11-19 0.43

2005-08-21 0.42.2

2005-07-24 0.42

2005-02-08 0.41

2004-11-28 0.40

2004-10-27 Snapshots

2004-07-15 0.39

2004-04-08 0.38.1

2004-02-10 0.37

SodiPodi

2004-02-10 0.34

2003-11-29 0.33

2003-06-19 0.32

2003-02-21 0.31

2003-02-06 0.30

2003-01-27 0.29

2002-11-24 0.28

2002-10-08 0.27

2002-09-21 0.26

2002-09-10 0.25

2001-10-04 0.24.1

2001-09-26 0.24

2001-05-17 0.23

2001-03-09 0.22

2001-01-25 0.21

2000-10-08 0.20

2000-08-18 0.19

2000-04-13 0.18.2

2000-03-27 0.17-2

2000-03-27 0.17

See too AboutScreen About screen history.