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The following is an excerpt from BBC Mundo:
El traductor de Google, por ejemplo, ha dado pasos gigantes desde que saliera al mercado en 2006.
Why is the subjunctive used here when we are talking about the known past? I can't embrace it. Can we use Preterito Simple instead?
You're right, that sentence could be perfectly well written like this:
... desde que salió al mercado...
Nonetheless, the use of the subjunctive mood in these kind of sentences is documented in paragraph 24.2l of the Spanish grammar by the Royal Spanish Academy. It is a use almost exclusive of the journalistic field. It may be also influenced by the sentence being part of a relative clause, which are often written using the subjunctive.
Just yesterday there was an article about this in El País. The basic idea is that this is an old use of the -era form of the subjunctive that has made a return.
Originally, the -era form was not the Pretérito Imperfecto de Subjuntivo, but the Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto Simple. There are many examples in Medieval literature. This form started being used as subjunctive, even though that tense already existed (the -ese form, saliese), and, little by little, became almost a synonym and the original usage was lost: today, the Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto is a compound form in Spanish, though the simple form remains in Galician or Portuguese.
Nowadays the old use has a revival in journalistic use. It is somewhat frowned upon by many users, but it really has it roots in centuries old usage, so it is hard to complain about it.
