Debian Linux was created by Ian Murdock in 1993, and went on to become one of the most widely used Linux distributions. It is the basis for many other Linux distributions. It was named by combining Ian's wife's name (Debra) with Ian's. See https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ for more information.
In 2015, Debian converted their distribution to rely on the buggy, monolithic init system, systemD (developed at RedHat), making it unsuitable for serious server work. The Devuan project was started to remove systemD from the distribution to increase reliability and maintain the Unix philosophy of separating the base system into discrete components. As such, though this section discusses Debian and Devuan, our focus (as primarily server systems admins) is on Devuan.