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. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu. 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 84June 2000: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se" 85 86August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly. 87 88The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third 89party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since 90the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16 91different bindings exist at the time of this writing. 92 93September, kerberos4 support was added. 94 95In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written 96from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1. 97 982001 99---- 100 101January, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or 102MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL 103in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from 104people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using 105libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is 106deemed "GPL incompatible".) 107 108curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This 109also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of 110code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul. 111 112The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001. 113 114August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and 115more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD 116ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation 117contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have 118never since got in touch again. 119 120September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the 121forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and 122without much whistles. 123 1242002 125---- 126 127June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is 12835000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations 129of CPUs and operating systems. 130 131To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to 132impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives 133a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS 134distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software. 135 136September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license 137only. 138 1392003 140---- 141 142January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds. 143 144February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment, 145there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site. 146 147Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June) 148and Negotiate (June). 149 150November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors 151to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors. 152 153December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported. 154 1552004 156---- 157 158January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support. 159 160June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors. 161 162This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the 163curl_formparse() function 164 165August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1 166 167 Public curl release number: 82 168 Releases counted from the very beginning: 109 169 Available command line options: 96 170 Available curl_easy_setopt() options: 120 171 Number of public functions in libcurl: 36 172 Amount of public web site mirrors: 12 173 Number of known libcurl bindings: 26 174 1752005 176---- 177 178April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is 179built. 180 181September: TFTP support was added. 182 183More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors. 184 185December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow 186 1872006 188---- 189 190January. We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation 191that turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that 192nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it. 193 194March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow 195 196April: Added the multi_socket() API 197 198September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the 199removal of ftp third party transfer support. 200 201November: Added SCP and SFTP support 202 2032007 204---- 205 206February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff 207 208July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification 209 2102008 211---- 212 213November: 214 215 Command line options: 128 216 curl_easy_setopt() options: 158 217 Public functions in libcurl: 58 218 Known libcurl bindings: 37 219 Contributors: 683 220 221 145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded. 222 2232009 224---- 225 226March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access 227 228August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name 229 230December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP 231 2322010 233---- 234 235January: Added support for RTSP 236 237February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length 238 239March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS 240for source code control 241 242May: Added support for RTMP 243 244Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff 245 246August: 247 248 Public curl releases: 117 249 Command line options: 138 250 curl_easy_setopt() options: 180 251 Public functions in libcurl: 58 252 Known libcurl bindings: 39 253 Contributors: 808 254 255 Gopher support added (re-added actually) 256 2572012 258---- 259 260 July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL 261 (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend). 262 263 Supports metalink 264 265 October: SSH-agent support. 266 2672013 268---- 269 270 February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking 271 approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper. 272 273 September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2. 274 275 October: Removed krb4 support. 276 277 December: Happy eyeballs. 278 2792014 280---- 281 282 March: first real release supporting HTTP/2 283 284 September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data 285