Open Salamander

The original version of Servant Salamander was developed by Petr Šolín during his studies at the Czech Technical University. He released it as freeware in 1997. After graduation, Petr Šolín founded the company Altap in cooperation with Jan Ryšavý. In 2001 they released the first shareware version of the program. In 2007 a new version was renamed to Altap Salamander 2.5. Many other programmers and translators contributed to the project. In 2019, Altap was acquired by Fine. After this acquisition, Altap Salamander 4.0 was released as freeware. In 2023, the project was open sourced under the GPLv2 license as Open Salamander 5.0.

The name Servant Salamander came about when Petr Šolín and his friend Pavel Schreib were brainstorming name for this project. At that time, the well-known file managers were the aging Norton Commander and the rising Windows Commander. They questioned why a file manager should be named Commander, which implied that it commanded instead of served. This thought led to the birth of the name Servant Salamander.

Please bear with us as Salamander was our first major project where we learned to program in C++. From a technology standpoint, it does not use C++ Core Guidelines, smart pointers, RAII, STL, or WIL, all of which were just beginning to evolve during the time Salamander was created. Many of the comments are written in Czech, but this is manageable due to recent progress in AI-powered translation. Salamander is a pure WinAPI application and does not use any frameworks, such as MFC.

We would like to thank Fine company for making the open sourced Salamander release possible.