History
The premises of the Dawn of Light emulator appeared in January 2002 (3 months after Dark Age of Camelot release) and the idea was to emulate DAoC game. The project was initially written in C++ under closed source (CoAD project).
In December 2002, has emerged the idea to change the language of the project from C++ to C#, and in March 2003 the idea of DOL was born : the framework was completely rewritten and it became open source, compared to CoAD, so that other people could contribute to the project.
The first big release came in November 2003 under the version v1.4, "our big much hyped release" according to Corillian, the former DOL Project Lead.
Most of the response was positive and two weeks after version v1.4.1 was released.
Since that date, the DOL project is evolving and the latest sources are now available on the Github portal.
Source : Old DOL history thread