Tails was first released in [August 2009](https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2009-August/002667.html), when it was still called `amnesia`.In 2019, Tails [[celebrated 10 years of existence|news/celebrating_10_years]].
Tails could not exist without [[Debian|https://www.debian.org/]], [[Debian Live|https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-live/]], and [[Tor|https://www.torproject.org/]]; see our [[contribute/relationship with upstream]] document for details.
Tails was inspired by the [[Incognito LiveCD|https://web.archive.org/web/20090220133020/http://anonymityanywhere.com/]]. The Incognito author declared it to be dead on March 23, 2010, and wrote that Tails "should be considered as its spiritual successor".
Some ideas (in particular the improvements to the [[contribute/design/memory_erasure]] procedure) were borrowed from [Liberté Linux](https://dee.su/liberte).