When I started studying astrology in 1990, I quickly needed a software for the
computation and naturally I found out astrolog 5.4, a powerful MS-DOS
program but with a strange and confusing structure and a poor
interface. It looks like (or it is ?) a C fork of a BASIC or FORTRAN program.

Yet I used it and even submitted a patch to its author, W.Pullen,
allowing postscript printing. But W.Pullen answered me that I was the
fourth to send him such a patch, actually.

Later in 1997 I installed linux on my PC and obviously wanted astrolog running
on it, but the problem remained. Astrolog has evolved meanwhile, a GUI was even
available but only for windows 16 bits. Therefore, if I wanted a GUI on
linux, I had to develop it myself.

After a few weeks of research I stumbled upon KDE, a desktop built
around QT, a portable C++ toolkit with a beautiful widget editor.
My choice has been made and I developed kastrolog, i.e. astrolog for
KDE. Not a mere frontend but a real port of the windows GUI.

Nevertheless, I wasn't satisfied. Astrolog remains difficult to
tackle. So slowly, the idea that I should redesigned it came to me,
and in September 15 2000, I started a new project named kastrolog 6 or
simply kas6. However, I quickly understood that it wasn't a smart move
to tinker with the sources of astrolog, and the project drifted towards a
radically new path: swisseph library, strong object oriented C++ structure, 
modern interface, internal multitasking, SQL database support and
native internationalization.

The project became so different that I needed a new name, and I
renamed it skylendar.
It is often said that skylendar is a simple derivative of astrolog; an
assumption far off from the reality. Skylendar has only just a few
common features with astrolog. As said before, its structure is
radically different, even if skylendar has been populated - as a mere
convenience - with some basic astro charts inspired from the ones from
astrolog. Skylendar has been designed so that it is fairly easy to
implement graphical charts.

skylendar followed the developpement path of KDE: skylendar 0.x to 1.x
for KDE 2, skylendar 2.x for KDE 3 and skylendar 3.x for KDE 4. It was
even possible to run 3.x on windows via KDE for windows.
That being said, I prefered to step off the KDE project because I was and
still am slightly disappointed by the KDE team's choices: too much
investment in graphical effects instead of useful features and too
many changes from a version to the next. But this is another story...

Then came skylendar 4.x. This time skylendar is no more related to
KDE, but became a 100% portable application. Wherever one can compile
Qt5, skylendar can be compiled.

It is hard to say how many open source projects are available on the
net. 500000, 1000000... Only a few are developed by a
team. Most of them remain the burden of a unique person: its
author. However this situation has its avantage. 




