How did TightVNC get started?
The project was born on the Cosource.com site. That was the place where potential sponsors of Open Source software could find developers for their projects. It was the spring of 2000; I was working on my thesis on data compression, while looking for a place to apply my knowledge in some real software project. I was lucky enough to see a request for a developer to “Optimize VNC for low-bandwidth networks” at Cosource.com, and decided to act as a developer on that project. On July 24th, I had prepared the first version of the Web site, and on August 19th the development was finished, and my work was accepted on the Cosource.com site. I implemented a new bandwidth-friendly VNC encoding, and called the encoding “Tight”, due to its compression capabilities. Thus, the initial name of the project was “VNC Tight Encoder”, and that was just a patch against the standard VNC source. Shortly after I started another project at Cosource.com (link to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine copy of site)
