Nov 2008 - jcr-cmis sandbox (org.apache.jackrabbit.dev)
The first hint about CMIS within Apache can be tracked down in a discussion raised by David Nuescheler, Day CTO, in the Jackrabbit mailing list; that was a proposal for a new sandbox called ‘jcr-cmis’ in Jackrabbit.
People from Day and Sourcesense (a european system integrator) were initially involved in the sandbox.

Feb 2009 - ‘Working on CMIS‘ (Nuxeo gets involved)
This thread marked the beginning of the first big code entry, since Florent Guillaume from Nuxeo, revealed their existing interest in CMIS and determination in contributing to its implementation within Apache.
And so he did! Florent has been the most active contributor to the CMIS Apache effort since then.

The same thread also served as a discussion for the new name of such an effort; the winner was Chemistry, from a suggestion by Torgeir Veimo

Apr 2009 - ‘Incubating Chemistry‘
The original plan of managing the CMIS related effort within Jackrabbit had to be changed, since a lot of interest was growing around it and both new code and new potential committers might need help from the Apache Incubator infrastructure.
For this reason, Jukka Zitting proposed such a ‘graduation’; Apache Chemistry was born, as a new incubated project on Apr 30th 2009.

Jul 2009 - ‘Contributing Client Test Harness‘ (welcome David Caruana from Alfresco).
The fact that Alfresco proposed (and did) the contribution of their client test harness was another very important step. Having a TCK within an aggregative effort is the only way to provide a transparent, vendor agnostic, compliance testing infrastructure.

Can you already see, at this point, the spontaneous flourishing of the healthy ecosystem, where a standard should be moulded?

Jan 2010 - ‘Contribution of python cmislib to Chemistry‘
One of the two big new updates for Chemistry has been the initiative from Jeff Potts from Optaros, who announced his wish to contribute his Python CMISlib. Apart from saying how much value is jumping in the project with Jeff’s entry, who is one of the most experienced and well known experts in both the Open Source and Content Management scenarios, this is changing (and evolving) a little bit the vision of Chemistry of being a Java ‘pond’, turning it pretty much in a multi language ‘playground’ (don’t take me wrong, this is all about a serious (play)ground).
I hope that some other Python guys, out there, will appreciate the idea of joining Jeff’s work and contributing to such part of the Chemistry project.

Jan 2010 - ‘OpenCMIS contribution to Chemistry‘
And here comes the last blast for Chemistry; the other big thing of the beginning of 2010. The OpenCMIS project, developed by Alfresco, OpenText and SAP, decided to join Apache Chemistry, requesting for a merge of the two codebases within the Apache infrastructure. Such a merge will be about different areas of the project, including low/high client libraries, server impl., test tools and web based tools.
But the most relevant implication of that, in my opinion, is the new involvement coming from Open Text and SAP, with more code and people coming from the already present Alfresco.

From what we could see, in the last, intense, 14 months, no name was more spot-on than this for an Open Source project. It looks like the chemical mixture keeps growing and getting the right potential for becoming a reference for the CMIS global initiative.