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 is shipped by
several distributions these days (~2003).

Behdad promised a major redesign of the interface and the code to code, but
it almost never happened, at least not before Iranian New Years of March
2004.  In the mean time, FriBidi was dubbed as a GNU package by Richard
Stallman.  The first time was in 2002, and he mis-spelled it as "FreeBidi".
Next time in 2003 he addressed the correct name "FriBidi", but 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 lives a peaceful life these days
(http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/FriBidi).  Major cleanup made to the
build system, and was reimported from scratch in the FreeDesktop CVS.  The
old CVS repository is still available under the "fribidi-sf.net" module.

You can find more details in the file ChangeLog.old in the GNU FriBidi CVS
repository.