# Historical Note

Saxon has been under development for over five years. Almost all the code was written by one person, Michael Kay, which has resulted in a high level of design integrity.

Saxon was originally written to support an internal project in ICL, and ICL continued to sponsor development of Saxon until Michael Kay the company in January 2001. ICL chose not to market it as a commercial product, but to make the code available to the public under the Mozilla public license. From 2001 through 2003 Michael Kay worked for Software AG, who continued to sponsor the development of Saxon as an open source product.

In March 2004 Michael Kay founded Saxonica Limited to provide ongoing development and support of Saxon as a commercial venture. The intent of the new company is to continue to produce the basic (non-schema-aware) version of Saxon as an open source product, while at the same time delivering professional services and additional modules (including a schema-aware processor) as commercial offerings. The commercial product incorporates the code of the open-source product in its entirety, with the addition of schema-processing technology, and is produced in accordance with the provisions defined by the Mozilla Public License.

The name Saxon was chosen because originally it was a layer on top of SAX. Also, it originally used the Ælfred parser (among others); Ælfred of course was a Saxon king...

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