Selenium is a free (open source) automated testing suite for web applications across different browsers and platforms. It is quite similar to HP Quick Test Pro (QTP) only that Selenium focuses on automating web-based applications.

Selenium is not just a single tool but a suite of software's, each catering to different testing needs of an organization. It has four components.

Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Selenium Remote Control (RC)

Since Selenium is a collection of different tools, it had different developers as well. Below are the key persons who made notable contributions to the Selenium Project

Primarily, Selenium was created by Jason Huggins in 2004. An engineer at ThoughtWorks, he was working on a web application that required frequent testing. Having realized that the repetitious manual testing of their application was becoming more and more inefficient, he created a JavaScript program that would automatically control the browser's actions. He named this program as the "JavaScriptTestRunner."

Seeing potential in this idea to help automate other web applications, he made JavaScriptRunner open-source which was later re-named as Selenium Core.