OTRS started as Open Ticket Request System. Then it became Open Technology Real Services, and later just the four letters. What has not changed in twenty-five years is the core: Perl, queues, and email turning into tickets. In 2026, the commercial name belongs to EasyVista; the free code lives on in forks. Below is the timeline, without the folklore of … Read more
GLPI is the French acronym for Gestionnaire Libre de Parc Informatique — the free IT asset manager. It began in 2003 at the INDEPNET association, became a Teclib’ product in 2015, and on 1 October 2025 reached version 11. In June 2026, the stable community release is 11.0.8; version 10.0 still … Read more
Debian 12 ships PHP 8.2. Ubuntu 24.04 ships 8.3. Debian 13, 8.4. Ubuntu 26.04, 8.5. A real host needs all three at once: the old WordPress site, the new Laravel application, and the cron CLI. The distribution repository does not allow it. Ondřej Surý’s does. nginx comes from nginx.org — stable, pinned, without mixing … Read more
Synacor no longer provides free FOSS binaries. Anyone who wants Zimbra 10.1 on Ubuntu downloads a community tarball: maldua/zimbra-foss or bTactic builds. Below: a clean installation on Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 LTS, DNS, install.sh, and the first zmcontrol status. This is not an official Synacor build; it is the tarball the forum uses when the … Read more
Zimbra is the Ajax groupware platform that wanted to be Exchange for Linux. It began as LiquidSys in 2003, became Zimbra Inc. on July 26, 2005, and took its name from the Talking Heads song I Zimbra. In September 2007, Yahoo bought it for US$ 350 million. Then came VMware, Telligent, and Synacor. On the 31 … Read more
Roundcube began as a personal project in Switzerland in July 2005: an IMAP webmail application in PHP that used real Ajax, not a CGI form. The first stable release came on March 4, 2008. Version 1.0 followed on April 7, 2014. On May 10, 2026, version 1.7 arrived. On the 6 … Read more
In 2002, Mischa Peters of High5! released a PHP application so he would not have to edit MySQL by hand: virtual domains, mailboxes, and aliases. He called it PostfixAdmin. GPL. Postfix delivered the mail; it lacked a service counter. Twenty-four years later, PostfixAdmin 4.0.5 (July 5, 2026) is still that counter — now with TOTP, app passwords, DKIM, … Read more
On April 7, 2001, Alexei Vladishev released Zabbix under the GPL. It was an internal tool; it became a project. Stable version 1.0 came only on March 23, 2004. In April 2005, SIA Zabbix was founded in Riga, Latvia. Twenty-one years as a company (anniversary on April 12, 2025), twenty-five … Read more
On March 19, 2005, NagiosQL arrived on SourceForge. Martin of wizonet put on the web what Nagios administrators had been doing in vim: host, service, contact, timeperiod, template — in a form, in MySQL, with a button to write to disk and another to run nagios -v. Twenty-one years later, version 3.5.0 still … Read more
On March 14, 1999, Ethan Galstad released NetSaint 0.0.1. He thought about a dozen people would care. It pinged hosts, ran plugins, sent email and pager alerts when a service went down — and again when it recovered. In 2002, the name became Nagios: “Nagios Ain’t Gonna Insist On Sainthood,” hagios = saint, … Read more
