Sun open-sourced the NetBeans IDE in June of the following year. In 1997, Roman Staněk formed a company around the project and produced commercial versions of the NetBeans IDE until it was bought by Sun Microsystems in 1999.
NetBeans began in 1996 as Xelfi (word play on Delphi), a Java IDE student project under the guidance of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague.