While working on the history of Gramps, I came cross a wonderful retrospective on the Gramps blog by the original creator of Gramps, Don Allingham, detailing how Gramps originally started as a simple Python script to help spot GEDCOM errors.
As his dad was wanting to move to Linux, he couldn’t find a suitable Linux genealogy program for his dad, so he created “Relativity” for him, with his dad then coming up with a new name.
And then things snowballed, to quote Don:
While we were taking breaks from drywalling my garage, we would play with “Relativity”. My father kept trying to convince me to release the program. I resisted the idea, because I didn’t see it as anything worthy of being released. But he persisted, and even came up with a new name for the program—”GRAMPS”. Of course, once he had the name he even came up with a meaning for the name (Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System). After he put in all this effort, how could I refuse? So I went to SourceForge, set up a project, and on April 21, 2001, I uploaded gramps-0.1.1. I figured this would be the end of it. I released the program and assumed it would disappear into oblivion and I would continue to have a bit of fun on my own.
But something strange happened. Within a day or two I started to get a few email messages. A couple of people reported a few problems. One person sent a patch. Another offered to help translate the program to Swedish. I played along a bit, fixed a few bugs and even figured out how to support another language. I uploaded the new version (0.1.2) and figured that I was done.
If you use Gramps these days, you know how popular and well-supported it is (hundreds of plugins/addons are available for it).
The 5-year retrospective is worth a read – many a genealogy program has been started by one person seeing a need for something, and taking the time to create a program to fill that need.