In Feb 6 1996, Tim Wilkinson released the first version of Kaffe as version 0.1, which is the first independent free and open source implementation of Java Virtual Machine. See the ChangeLog here:
Tue Feb 6 11:38:46 MET 1996 Tim Wilkinson <tim@sarc.city.ac.uk>The brave action inspires many developers around the world, and various research projects and commercial products were constructing on the basis of Kaffe, and we could find some Kaffe-related projects in Links. Now, after ten years, there are many and many free Java runtimes and "clones". It's really amazing that GNU Classpath, GCJ, Kaffe, etc. are going better and better, more and more robust, and still free and open. :-)* Version 0.1 of Kaffe released.
Happy Birthday to Kaffe!