The ArsTech article provides a great potted history of the project, it includes a lot of the information I had hoped to read here at Wikipedia. I'll try to briefly summarize: from a 1 man project to a 2 man project, eventually getting a code repository. Story on Slashdot November 3, 2001, bringing many more developers and users. The scope of the project expands to more than just SCUMM games. Rewritten from C to C++ starting in 2002, addition of a GUI, etc. 
 Then the legal issues with LucasArts  this is far a more notable part of the history of the project than an alleged GPL violation many many years later  and their amicable resolution and ongoing development of the project. (That's just page 1)
 Then cooperation from games companies, sharing of source code and in some cases offering the games as freeware (a section of prose on this would provide context and make the long lists of later in the article more meaningful). ScummVM developers evening working with companies under NDAs. Merging the SCI engine goes from April fools joke to actual reality many years later. 
 page 4 of the article talks about the Mystic GPL issue that already has been given undue weight in this article, an issue best solved by rebalancing the article with more prose. The article mentions touch support added for WebOS that might be generalized and also mentions the Google Summer of Code. 
 I encourage others to take my brief summary and flesh it back out again to create a few paragraphs about the History/Development of ScummVM and improve this wikipedia article.  109.76.13.212