AEON was launched by some other anonymous dev, along with a large number (dozen or more) of other cryptonote clone coins launched around that time. I don't know his intent in doing so (nor the others).

I mentioned it because I'm maintaining it (most of the others are unmaintained now) and it also happens to be the one that is closest to Monero without other fundamental changes such as variable rewards, merged mining, etc. and finally was launched after the miner fixes.