For anyone who approach FOSS photo processing programs nowadays there are two dominating raw developers, dt and RT, (with their fairly recent forks, Ansel and ART).
Those who have been around since the creation of the earth, know the history behind this situation. Could some of you please inform a rookie in a few words about this? Was there just two independent projects that grew in different places/minds at about the same time, or was one created as an alternative to the first one, and in case why?
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I don’t know if a similar summary is available for DT but a summary of how RT got rolling is found here…
RawTherapee - Back In Time - RawTherapee From 2004 Till 2010 Today.
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The oldest entry on the darktable blog: 0.2 beta is out! | darktable
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This might be the initial commit…
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RT was previously a proprietary app that was made open source.
dt came about… Because @hanatos wanted to? Lol
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“seemed like a good idea at the time” 
when dt was started, rt was still closed source (free to try yet would crash with more recent glibc such as gentoo had in the day). there was rawstudio, a small project that kinda hosted the beginnings of rawspeed, but the results i could get with that were limited. something about tone curves and default settings, i don’t quite remember. it had the most incredibly clean code base though. other than that there was ufraw and a gimp plugin for it. so from some angle you could say that there was simply no functional raw workflow tool on linux.
if you want more historic miscellanea: the first version of darktable was simply using ufraw compiled into the same library 8 times with different name, so it could be run by 8 threads in parallel (ufraw used static state variables…). though this was very quickly replaced, it predates the abovementioned blog post…
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