It is now a decade since the discovery of the first GRB afterglows in
1997. This has been a period of great progress in the GRB field, with the
origin of the so-called long duraiton gamma-ray bursts greatly
constrainted by observations. More recently similar progress has begun to
be made for the short duration population of GRBs. I will discuss the
progentiors of both long and short duration GRBs, and the possibility that
both arise from processes in rather similar binary systems. Finally, based
on our understanding of their progenitors I will present results on the
uses of GRBs as probes of the distant universe.
