The original idea goes back to around 2005 and frustration at the ever-growing size of glibc and poor (slow) support for UTF-8. At the time I made a prototype and used it personally. In 2010 I relaunched the project with a goal of doing it a lot better and targeting user bases who might actually be looking for a new libc; later on this turned out to include a lot of people unhappy with GPL/LGPL, so we re-licensed from LGPLv2.1+ to MIT.