While I was still finalising the first ZAP release someone else beat me to it 😟.
After years of being neglected, Paros was also forked by Axel Neumann who called his version AndiParos.
I’ll have to admit that I was very disheartened and seriously considered abandoning my plans for ZAP.
However on reflection I decided to press ahead anyway. It looked like Axel’s focus was on pentesting while I wanted to create a web security tool for developers, and I also wanted to use the Apache V2 license rather than the GPL v2 license Axel had chosen.
Axel actually spotted ZAP before I announced it and you can see our first conversations here: https://groups.google.com/g/zaproxy-develop/c/kq3ewjifrOc/m/Vrj6DnF0jB4J
In time we agreed to work together and Axel became the second contributor to work on ZAP, after myself.