The Debian project was started by Ian Murdock on August the 16th 1993 while studying at Purdue University. Debian was created to be a distribution that would follow the spirit of Linux and GNU and thus be made openly by the community. The creation of Debian was funded by the FSF GNU project for one year between November 1994 and November 1995. The name Debian is a portmanteau of Debra (then Ians girlfriend and now his wife) and Ian it is pronounced deb-e-an.

From the start Debian was intended to be a carefully put together and well maintained distribution of the highest standard possible. This has been carried through to the present day with Debian still being one of, if not the, most stable Linux distributions around.

There are a number of things that set Debian apart from other Linux distributions and even other open source projects. The running of Debian is governed by a constitution, social contract, and policy documents which help provide a measure of stability in the community. Debian was also the first distribution to be micro-packaged and rely on package interdependencies to perform reliable system upgrades. In terms of size Debian (and it's off shoot projects such as Ubuntu) is far and away the largest non-commercial Linux distribution.