1 _ _ ____ _ 2 ___| | | | _ \| | 3 / __| | | | |_) | | 4 | (__| |_| | _ <| |___ 5 \___|\___/|_| \_\_____| 6 7How cURL Became Like This 8========================= 9 10Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot 11for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make 12currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) 13users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to 14automate their retrieval. 15 16Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that 17Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently release version 0.1 of. After 18a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed. 19 201997 21---- 22 23HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support. 24 25We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP 26download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0 27was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed. 28 291998 30---- 31 32The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the 33name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20, 341998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was 35kept.) 36 37(Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US 38trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already 39registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this 40was revealed to us much later.) 41 42SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library. 43 44August, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net. 45 46October, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support, 47curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000 lines of 48code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of 49"copyleft". 50 51November, configure script and reported successful compiles on several 52major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and 53curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added. 54 55Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man 56page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it. 57 581999 59---- 60 61January, DICT support added. 62 63OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned. 64 65May, first Debian package. 66 67August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits 68weekly. 69 70Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code. 71 72December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services 73for managing the project. 74 752000 76---- 77 78Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface. 79The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered 80the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting 81other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost 8220000 lines of code. 83 84August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly. 85 86The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third 87party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since 88the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16 89different bindings exist at the time of this writing. 90 91September, kerberos4 support was added. 92 93In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written 94from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1. 95 962001 97---- 98 99January, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or 100MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL 101in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from 102people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using 103libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is 104deemed "GPL incompatible".) 105 106curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This 107also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of 108code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul. 109 110The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001. 111 112August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and 113more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD 114ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation 115contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have 116never since got in touch again. 117 118September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the 119forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and 120without much whistles. 121 1222002 123---- 124 125June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is 12635000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations 127of CPUs and operating systems. 128 129To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to 130impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives 131a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS 132distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software. 133 134September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license 135only. 136 1372003 138---- 139 140January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds. 141 142February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment, 143there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site. 144 145Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June) 146and Negotiate (June). 147 148November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors 149to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors. 150 151December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported. 152 1532004 154---- 155 156January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support. 157 158June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors. 159 160This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the 161curl_formparse() function 162 163August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1 164 165 Public curl release number: 82 166 Releases counted from the very beginning: 109 167 Available command line options: 96 168 Available curl_easy_setopt() options: 120 169 Number of public functions in libcurl: 36 170 Amount of public web site mirrors: 12 171 Number of known libcurl bindings: 26 172 1732005 174---- 175 176April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is 177built. 178 179September: TFTP support was added. 180 181More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors. 182 183December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow 184 1852006 186---- 187 188January. We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation 189that turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that 190nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it. 191 192March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow 193 194April: Added the multi_socket() API 195 196September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the 197removal of ftp third party transfer support. 198 199November: Added SCP and SFTP support 200 2012007 202---- 203 204February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff 205 206July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification 207 2082008 209---- 210 211November: 212 213 Command line options: 128 214 curl_easy_setopt() options: 158 215 Public functions in libcurl: 58 216 Known libcurl bindings: 37 217 Contributors: 683 218 219 145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded. 220 2212009 222---- 223 224March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access 225 226August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name 227 228December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP 229 2302010 231---- 232 233January: Added support for RTSP 234 235February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length 236 237March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS 238for source code control 239 240May: Added support for RTMP 241 242Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff 243 244August: 245 246 Public curl releases: 117 247 Command line options: 138 248 curl_easy_setopt() options: 180 249 Public functions in libcurl: 58 250 Known libcurl bindings: 39 251 Contributors: 808 252 253 Gopher support added (re-added actually) 254 2552012 256---- 257 258 July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL 259 (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend). 260 261 Supports metalink 262 263 October: SSH-agent support. 264 2652013 266---- 267 268 February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking 269 approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper. 270 271 September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2. 272 273 October: Removed krb4 support. 274 275 December: Happy eyeballs. 276 2772014 278---- 279 280 March: first real release supporting HTTP/2 281 282 September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data 283