History
The idea of eBox came up from DBS Servicios Informaticos back in the beginning of 2004, as an open source platform to ease the administration of corporate networks. For its development DBS promoted the creation of a group of local companies that could bring technical know-how and share the costs. This is when the idea of eBox merged with the idea of founding Warp Networks, a project of start-up made up by some of the most active open source developers in the region.
In September 2004 Warp Networks was finally founded, being in charge of the technical development of eBox, while DBS remained with the tasks of funding and coordinating the project, with the common objective of having an open source functional prototype by December 2005.
On 1st December 2005 eBox finally was publicly released, at version 0.7, with some basic functionality such as firewall, content filtering, users and groups, email server or printer sharing. This release also meant the conclusion of the DBS-Warp agreement, leaving the future of eBox uncertain. After the diverging visions of eBox evolution became clear, Warp Networks took the whole responsibility of eBox development and funding.
In February 2006 eBox 0.7.1 was out, fixing some bugs and implementing the PDC module. At the same time, effort was spent in finding new sources of funding. This way, in May 2006 eBox was presented at Innovate!Europe2006, a conference putting in contact some of the most promising European start-ups with investors from around the world. Two months later, in July 2006, eBox was approved as a NEOTEC project by CDTI, a public organization dependent on the Ministry of Industry in Spain, contributing with the needed financing to complete the development of the 1.0 version. This important source of funding allowed the reinforcement of eBox development group and the release of version 0.8 in December 2006 and version 0.9 in March 2007, with new functionality such as backup, VPN or traffic shaping.
Nowadays eBox has a growing user community supporting its evolution and making it one of the most promising open source projects related with networks administration.
