History
Early times
In 1998, Free Software sound and music applications had already reached a situation that could be considered well beyond the initial pioneering stage. A website, maintained by musician and GNU/Linux enthusiast Dave Phillips, was already collecting all possible sound and music software running on GNU/Linux architectures. At that time, the biggest problem was that all these applications were dispersed over the Internet: there was no common operational framework and each and every application was a case-study by itself.
First try
A natural development followed shortly after, when musician/composer/programmer Marco Trevisani proposed a to a small group of friends (Nicola Bernardini, Maurizio De Cecco, Davide Rocchesso and Roberto Bresin) the idea of creating LAOS (Linux Audio Open Sourcing), a binary distribution of all essential sound/music tools available at the time including website diffusion and support. LAOS came up too early, and it did not go very far.
Getting closer
But in 2000, when Marco Trevisani proposed (this time to Nicola Bernardini, Gunter Geiger, Dave Phillips and Maurizio De Cecco) to build DeMuDi (Debian Multimedia Distribution) an unofficial Debian-based binary distribution of sound/music Free Software, times were riper.
Nicola Bernardini organized a workshop in Firenze, Italy at the beginning of June 2001, inviting an ever-growing group of supporters and contributors (including: Marco Trevisani, Gunter Geiger, Dave Phillips, Francois Dechelle, Georg Greve, Stanko Juzbasic, Giampiero Salvi, Maurizio Umberto Puxeddu and Gabriel Maldonado). That was the occasion to start the first concrete DeMuDi distribution, the venerable 0.0 alpha which was then quickly assembled by Gunter Geiger with help from Marco Trevisani. A bootable CD-version was then burned just in time for the ICMC 2001 held in La Habana, Cuba, where Gunter Geiger and Nicola Bernardini held a tutorial workshop showing the features, uses and advantages of DeMuDi.
AGNULA
On November 26, 2001 the European Commission awarded the AGNULA Consortium - composed by the Centro Tempo Reale, IRCAM, the IUA-MTG at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Free Software Foundation Europe, KTH and Red Hat France - with consistent funding for an accompanying measure lasting 24 months (IST-2001-34879). This accompanying measure, which was terminated on March 31st 2004, gave considerable thrust to the AGNULA/A/DeMuDi project providing scientific applications previously unreleased in binary form and the possibility to pay professional personnel to work on the distribution.
AGNULA has constituted a major step in the direction of creating a full-blown Free Software infrastructure devoted to audio, sound and music, but there's much more to it: it is the first example of a European-funded project to clearly specify the complete adherence of its results to the Free Software paradigm in the project contract, thus becoming an important precedent for similar projects in the future.
Voluntary project
After the funded period, Media Innovation Unit, a component of Firenze Tecnologia (itself a technological agency of the Chamber of Commerce of Firenze) decided to partly fund further AGNULA/A/DeMuDi developments for another year or so. Since then development work on DeMuDi has continued on an entirely voluntary basis.
