Bash
GNU Bourne-Again SHell
Perhaps one of the most famous programs from the GNU project.
Version 1
In the early days...
The beta announcement for bash 0.99 came in June 1989. The intention was to keep compatibility with the Bourne shell, and the source code for this GPL implementation, as well as binaries for several architectures such as Sun-3/Sun-4/VAX, were published with the announcement.
Without the earliest versions in the release archive, bash reached version 1.14 by mid 1994. The latest available patch is bash 1.14.7 from August 1996.
Version 2
More mainstream, and starting to get Linux central.
bash 2.0 was released in December 1996, with the most recent 2.05b in August 2004.
Version 3
bash 3.0 was released in August 2004, with the most recent 3.2 coming in October 2006. This version had a long lifespan, with minor patches like 3.2.48 in 2009 and 3.2.57 in 2014.
Notably, bash 3.x was the last version released under the GPLv2. This means that some products that have an incompatible license with GPLv3 have stayed on bash 3.x; for example Apple kept bash 3.2 as the default shell of Mac OS X / macOS until 2019
Version 4
bash 4.0 was released in February 2009, with the most recent 4.4 patch in January 2018. As suggested above, this version adopted the GPLv3 license.
Version 5
bash 5.0 was released in January 2019, with the most recent 5.2 patch in November 2023. This is the version under active development as of 2023.
