1How curl Became Like This 2========================= 3 4Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot 5for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make 6currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) 7users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to 8automate their retrieval. 9 10Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that 11Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently release version 0.1 of. After 12a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed. 13 141997 15---- 16 17HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support. 18 19We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP 20download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0 21was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed. 22 231998 24---- 25 26The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the 27name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20, 281998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was 29kept.) 30 31(Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US 32trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already 33registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this 34was revealed to us much later.) 35 36SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library. 37 38August, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net. 39 40October, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support, 41curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000 lines of 42code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of 43"copyleft". 44 45November, configure script and reported successful compiles on several 46major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and 47curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added. 48 49Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man 50page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it. 51 521999 53---- 54 55January, DICT support added. 56 57OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned. 58 59May, first Debian package. 60 61August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits 62weekly. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu. 63 64Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code. 65 66December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services 67for managing the project. 68 692000 70---- 71 72Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface. 73The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered 74the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting 75other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost 7620000 lines of code. 77 78June 2000: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se" 79 80August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly. 81 82The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third 83party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since 84the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16 85different bindings exist at the time of this writing. 86 87September, kerberos4 support was added. 88 89In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written 90from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1. 91 922001 93---- 94 95January, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or 96MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL 97in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from 98people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using 99libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is 100deemed "GPL incompatible".) 101 102curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This 103also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of 104code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul. 105 106The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001. 107 108August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and 109more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD 110ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation 111contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have 112never since got in touch again. 113 114September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the 115forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and 116without much whistles. 117 1182002 119---- 120 121June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is 12235000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations 123of CPUs and operating systems. 124 125To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to 126impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives 127a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS 128distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software. 129 130September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license 131only. 132 1332003 134---- 135 136January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds. 137 138February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment, 139there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site. 140 141Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June) 142and Negotiate (June). 143 144November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors 145to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors. 146 147December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported. 148 1492004 150---- 151 152January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support. 153 154June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors. 155 156This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the 157curl_formparse() function 158 159August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1 160 161 Public curl release number: 82 162 Releases counted from the very beginning: 109 163 Available command line options: 96 164 Available curl_easy_setopt() options: 120 165 Number of public functions in libcurl: 36 166 Amount of public web site mirrors: 12 167 Number of known libcurl bindings: 26 168 1692005 170---- 171 172April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is 173built. 174 175April: Added the multi_socket() API 176 177September: TFTP support was added. 178 179More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors. 180 181December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow 182 1832006 184---- 185 186January. We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation 187that turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that 188nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it. 189 190March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow 191 192September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the 193removal of ftp third party transfer support. 194 195November: Added SCP and SFTP support 196 1972007 198---- 199 200February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff 201 202July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification 203 2042008 205---- 206 207November: 208 209 Command line options: 128 210 curl_easy_setopt() options: 158 211 Public functions in libcurl: 58 212 Known libcurl bindings: 37 213 Contributors: 683 214 215 145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded. 216 2172009 218---- 219 220March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access 221 222August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name 223 224December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP 225 2262010 227---- 228 229January: Added support for RTSP 230 231February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length 232 233March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS 234for source code control 235 236May: Added support for RTMP 237 238Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff 239 240August: 241 242 Public curl releases: 117 243 Command line options: 138 244 curl_easy_setopt() options: 180 245 Public functions in libcurl: 58 246 Known libcurl bindings: 39 247 Contributors: 808 248 249 Gopher support added (re-added actually) 250 2512012 252---- 253 254 July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL 255 (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend). 256 257 Supports metalink 258 259 October: SSH-agent support. 260 2612013 262---- 263 264 February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking 265 approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper. 266 267 September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2. 268 269 October: Removed krb4 support. 270 271 December: Happy eyeballs. 272 2732014 274---- 275 276 March: first real release supporting HTTP/2 277 278 September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data 279