The Apache ActiveMQ Artemis project was started in October 2014. The Artemis code base was seeded with a code donation granted by Red Hat, of the HornetQ project. The code donation process consisted of taking a snapshot of the latest HornetQ code base and contributing this snapshot as an initial git commit into the Artemis git repository.
The HornetQ commit history is preserved and can be accessed here: https://github.com/hornetq/hornetq/tree/apache-donation
Credit should be given to those developers who contributed to the HornetQ project. The top 10 committers are highlighted here:
For more information please visit the HornetQ GitHub project.
It may be useful to look at the donation history combined with the artemis history. It is the case when eventually looking at old changes.
For that there is a script that will rebase master against the donation branch under master/scripts: