FriBidi was first developed by Dov Grobgeld of the Ivrix project, a few
releases happened there, up to 0.1.15.  This was late 2000.

Behdad Esfahbod of the FarsiWeb project started reading and hacking FriBidi
in the same days.  As per request of Roozbeh Pournader from the FarsiWeb
project, FriBidi development was moved to SourceForge (http://www.sf.net/),
under the same name (http://fribidi.sf.net/).

Behdad started applying patches in early 2001, and became the new
maintainer.  He first aimed for full compliance of the standard, and then
applied the GNU Coding Standards.  The effort was then released in the
Iranian New Year celebrations on 2001-03-29 as FriBidi 0.9.0.

Since then, FriBidi has been quite stable.  A few other releases were made,
to fix bugs, code cleanup, etc which all led to the release of FriBidi
0.10.4 on 2002-05-19.  It turned out to be quite stable, and has been shipped by several distributions since 2003.

FriBidi was dubbed as a GNU package by Richard Stallman in 2002.  The
first time he mis-spelled it as "FreeBidi".  Next time in 2003 he
addressed the correct name "FriBidi". The transition to gnu.org
(http://www.gnu.org/) never happened, due to long down-times of
gnu.org due to several administrative problems.

GNU FriBidi was finally moved to the FreeDesktop project
(http://www.freedesktop.org), which it lived at
(http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/FriBidi) until it moved to its
current home at GitHub (https://github.com/fribidi/fribidi).  

You can find more details in the file ChangeLog.old.
