History
the beginning
The BlueZ stack was initially developed by Max Krasnyansky at Qualcomm and in 2001 (May, 3rd) they decided to release it under the GPL. The announcement was sent to the Axis Bluetooth developer mailing list and this became the start of the official Linux Bluetooth stack. One month later it was picked up by Linus Torvalds for inclusion into the Linux kernel and starting with the 2.4.6 kernel release Linux got its own Bluetooth stack.
On January, 15th 2004 the maintainership of the BlueZ was handed over to Marcel Holtmann. This was almost a month later after Linus Torvalds released the first version of the 2.6 kernel series.
The goal of an official qualifcation of BlueZ as a subsystem by the Bluetooth SIG was reached on April, 11th 2005 with the help from TomTom BV.
an era ends
The first open source Bluetooth stack was developed by Axis Communications and was called OpenBT. On April, 14th 2005 Anders Johansson announced that its development has been discontinued and the mailing list will be closed.