LibrePlan as a project started in April 2009 in Galicia (Spain) with the aim to build a planning tool for the Galician regional naval auxiliary sector. It was a public tender financed by the government and won by Igalia, which developed it with the help of Wireless Galicia – you can read about the details of the specific official institutitions involved below.

It was a project conceived as free software under a philosophy of knowledge sharing and collaboration among the Galician naval companies. These companies needed to plan, monitor and control their projects and this need was not solved by the programs they worked with.

The application was named NavalPlan in December 2009, in a clear reference to the shipbuilding sector, but, in spite of this oriented name, the final result was a generic project management tool suitable to many industrial sectors. Igalia andWireless Galicia, being aware of the general purpose of the application and its potential, in 2010 made the decision to push LibrePlan with the goal to turn it in the most important web planning application in the free world.

A timeline with the main events since then is the following:

• July 2010. Project is moved to Sourceforge.net

• January 2011. Version 1.0 is released.

• April 2011. Version 1.1 is released with important enhancements among which can be highlighted: over allocation control support, hierarchical criteria, new generic allocation algorithm … Besides, during this month the community approves to change the name of the project to LibrePlan.

• May 2011. Project team delivers a talk in LinuxTag in Berlin (Germany).

• November 2011. Project is presented in Libre Software World Conference2011 in Zaragoza (Spain). LibrePlan 1.2 is released.
• Oktober 2013. Jeroen Baten takes over as project leader. Please see the news section for all changes since then.

Official institutions involved

LibrePlan was started thanks to a public tender published by Fundacion para o Fomento da Calidade e o Desenvolvemento Tecnolóxico de Galicia, foundation dependent of the Ministry of industry of Xunta de Galicia. Xunta is the regional government of Galicia, which is an area located in the northwest of the Iberian pennisula.

In the development of the project, apart from Xunta, Igalia and Wireless Galicia, collaborated the Cluster of the Galician Naval Sector (ACLUNAGA) through some representative companies and people from the Boards of Directors.

Apart from Xunta de Galicia, the project was supported by the  Ministry of industry, tourism and trade of Spain. It was part of the Plan Avanza and was financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).