Forum GLPI-Project

jstadema

Member

From: Hamburg

Registered: 2007-06-18

Posts: 11

History of GLPI

I am interisting to now something about the History of GLPI.

Which was the initial objective to develop GLPI? Was there a big customer? What was the purpose of the Software at the beginning? What was the main use?

I can't find anything about this in the Net.

Best regards
Jörn

baaz

Member

Registered: 2004-09-13

Posts: 513

Re: History of GLPI

GLPI was born when i was student and making my first training period in some local government agency (seems to be a bad translation, some kind of "city hall" but for a group of many cities) at south of France (called : Montpellier Agglomération).

I was there to make and deploy an IT Asset management solution, in place of the old M$ access solution based, for approximatively 500-600 computers and 10 servers at this time.
In first i search through the existant open sources project. I found IRM (irm.sourceforge.net), but seemed to me complicated to maintain and far to be what they really want. Then i found IRMA that was a kind of IRM fork, with much cleaner source and documented code and a little LDAP integration.

In first i translated all the dicts into french, then I tried to contact Christian Bauer (wich was the official maintainer of IRMA) in order  to give him the contrib. He answered me that IRMA would not grow anymore and that he may have no time to continue the project.
So I made a lot of new feature, and may changed above half of the existing source code (something like 7000 lines to be compare to the more than 80 000 of GLPI now)  to make it as they (the administration) wanted it to be, and deploy GLPI there. Where it's in use since above april 2003.

Then my friend JMD and I, after long and long discussions decided to purchase the dev with the help of the foundation indepnet  that gived the technical infrastructure and some official status to the project team, and GNA.org that is the french FSF savannah like (now mailing lists are always at GNA).

I asked christian bauer another time, he sayed that in compliance of the GPL we could do what we want, just he would keep the name IRMA for him. We decided this time to give the name GLPI to the project.

Then the communauty growed, and GLPI too with the help of anyone's idea, many contribs and a lot of patience. It had took long time, but as we see the tool seems to be good... that's a very rich experience, the birth of a new open source communauty, i'm wondering if someday i won't make some paper about this.

And... for me : lack of time, some life choices, and the assurance that there was good and pretty people to continue make me leave the dev team after between the 0.5 and 0.6 release.

For the main use :  it have been installed first was to manage inventory, some specific maintain contracts and all standard asset management things.
Quickly the helpdesk was adopted by the technical team and now they could'nt do without it.

Hope i answered... and sorry for my bad english and for the quasi whole first person post, i may have not wroten it like this in french...

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Bazile Lebeau

jstadema

Member

From: Hamburg

Registered: 2007-06-18

Posts: 11

Re: History of GLPI

Thank you for this interesting history.

I will also say that GLPI is a great and tool!!

Best regards
Jörn