Short answers, pulled from the story.
DevIL originally launched under the name OpenIL. This initial title created legal friction with Silicon Graphics, Inc., which requested a change to avoid confusion with their proprietary libraries.
Denton Woods launched the project that would become DevIL in the early 2000s. The library began life under the different name called OpenIL before Woods complied with requests to rename it.
DevIL currently supports 43 file formats for reading data into memory. It also handles writing operations for 17 different formats depending on user configuration and compilation settings.
The main library carries core image handling logic and is known simply as IL. A second component serves as the utility library and bears the name ILU while the third piece functions as the utility toolkit and goes by the label ILUT.
DevIL operates under the terms of the LGPL license agreement today. This classification places it within the Free Software Foundation directory of approved projects and allows developers to use, modify, and distribute the code freely.