In November, 2002, the GraphicsMagick project was formed as a branch from ImageMagick 5.5.2. The project was formed in order to develop a more "stable" form of ImageMagick which is suitable to be use as a base for other open source (and proprietary) applications. It was perceived that ImageMagick provided tremendous value, but also proved to be difficult to rely on as a stable application component since the ImageMagick interfaces often changed between releases, and there was no concept of shared library ABI stability. GraphicsMagick intends to resolve these issues while providing an appealing development environment to attract the best available developers.