"hiStOry oF dOtA"

Aeon of Strife, as said, is a starcraft custom game which inspired the idea for DotA, which was made by Eul. He edited the map for awhile and then abandoned it for real-life stuff. Kegsta was next, and did a pretty good job. Then Quantum.dx tried editing the map, but it was on TFT which was already dominated by Allstars (see below) and pretty much failed. Somewhere along the lines, Eul decided to make the map 'open source', which basically means anynone can do whatever they want to it.

After that, lots of different editors tried to change the map, but the community in general is to stubborn to change with the map. Some of the editors were Fluffy_Bunny; Ryude; Danite (formerly known as Publicious on TWC); a couple others who I can't remember the names of. Recently, Danite released the 'AT edition', where the main changes from 3.7 are a nerf to panda and hibernal, and some Titan buffs.

A long time ago, Guinsoo got his grubby paws on the map (I believe he was a tester or something) and decided to make his own version of it (before Eul made it open source), and radically changed the game. He changed many heroes and the terrain and the overall gameplay. He also stole many (over 90%) of the things in his map from other, better, honorable editors along with the DotA name. He, in my and many others' opinions, made the map with horrible balance and stupid gameplay. This made moving from RoC to TFT nigh impossible, even if the RoC community was willing to help.

Recently, Guinsoo stopped making new versions of Allstars and passed the map to someone else. They seem to be doing a good (better, atleast) job of balancing the game. I don't know whether or not the new editor is stealing things from other maps and editors.

On the Asia server, someone (I can't recall their name) made a version of DotA called DOTA CHAOS, which I frankly don't know very much about. I do know that it's 'taking over' the Asia server and almost universally played over Allstars. Whether or not this is a good thing is in the eyes of the beholder, but most of the RoC DotA community seem to like the idea of Allstars and Guinsoo going down.

Some of the above may be inaccurate, but that's the jist of it. I've only been playing DotA for a year or so, so I'm not exactly a 'vet'