It was originally required to build OpenOffice, but in 2009 the build system was rewritten to use GNU Make.
BASIC MAKEFILE FOR C PROGRAM SOFTWARE
Feldman received the 2003 ACM Software System Award for the authoring of this widespread tool. It was originally created by Stuart Feldman in April 1976 at Bell Labs. There are now a number of dependency-tracking build utilities, but Make is one of the most widespread, primarily due to its inclusion in Unix, starting with the PWB/UNIX 1.0, which featured a variety of tools targeting software development tasks.