The first commit was the 3rd of January, 2003.
We started our own project because we couldn’t find another framework that was both robust and flexible enough to meet our needs (what else is new?!). We drew a lot of inspiration from Horde (http://horde.org/), but in the end decided to create our own, in part because we learned that frameworks are like shoes – there’s no one-size-fits-all.
Well, it’s open source, so anyone is welcome to contribute. However, Brooks Institute of Photography pays two of the main developers to work on it, so you could say they indirectly fund it.