This history of OpenRC was written by Daniel Robbins, Roy Marples, William Hubbs and others.
The Gentoo modular init scripts were developed by Daniel Robbins for Gentoo Linux 1.0_rc6 during most of 2001 and released in September 2001. After their development, the dependency-based init script system was maintained by a number of senior developers, starting with Azarah (Martin Schlemmer), with migration to the new init system assisted by Woodchip (Donnie Davies) who converted all ebuild init scripts to work with the new system. As Grant Goodyear notes:
"My recollection is that one of woodchip's more impressive early feats was the complete replacement of all of the init scripts in Portage for Gentoo Linux 1.0_rc6. Through 1.0_rc5 Gentoo had used fairly standard rc scripts modified from Stampede Linux, but for 1.0_rc6 Daniel Robbins (drobbins) and Martin Schlemmer (azarah) had created a new dependency-based init script system that is still used today. Within a span of days Donny rewrote every single init script in the Portage tree and committed new masked packages to await the release of 1.0_rc6. Thanks to woodchip (and drobbins and azarah, of course) the transition to the new init scripts was nearly painless." [1]
Roy Marples became a Gentoo/Linux developer in 2004 and wrote the modular network scripts for the Gentoo baselayout package. Towards the end of 2005, he became the primary maintainer for baselayout and the init scripts.
At the start of 2007, He announced the ongoing development of baselayout-2, containing a rewritten core coded in C and allowing POSIX sh init scripts instead of forcing the use of bash. By mid 2007, He had re-implemented the Gentoo init script design created by Daniel Robbins, using an entirely new code base. Alpha and pre-release baselayout-2 snapshots were added to Gentoo's Portage tree as an optional component.
Toward the end of 2007, Roy retired as a Gentoo developer. Baselayout-2 was still in the pre stage, and aside from the gentoo-fbsd users, it was masked. However, He desired to keep the baselayout-2 project moving forward as an independent project. The Gentoo Council permitted Him to release OpenRC under the 2-clause BSD license, managed by him as an external project.
Around mid-2010, Roy decided to no longer maintain OpenRC. At this point, he transferred development back to Gentoo.
William Hubbs, and several other Gentoo developers, started working on OpenRC around this point and brought OpenRC-0.8.x to Gentoo Linux's stable tree in 2011.
In 2013 the OpenRC team became independent from Gentoo again and moved primary development to github.
Daniel Robbins continues to maintain an independent, forked version of OpenRC for Funtoo Linux, which includes a Funtoo-specific network configuration system.
On 17-Dec-2015 utc, Roy gave the OpenRC developers permission to replace his copyrights in all source files with a generic Copyright assertion for the OpenRC developers as long as we keep the original copyright in the binaries and LICENSE file.
[1] http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20040426-newsletter.xml