1 _ _ ____ _ 2 ___| | | | _ \| | 3 / __| | | | |_) | | 4 | (__| |_| | _ <| |___ 5 \___|\___/|_| \_\_____| 6 7 How cURL Became Like This 8 ========================= 9 10 Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot 11 for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make 12 currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) 13 users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to 14 automate their retrieval. 15 16 Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that 17 Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently release version 0.1 of. After 18 a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed. 19 20 1997 21 ---- 22 23 HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support. 24 25 We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP 26 download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0 27 was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed. 28 29 1998 30 ---- 31 32 The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the 33 name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20, 34 1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was 35 kept.) 36 37 (Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US 38 trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already 39 registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this 40 was revealed to us much later.) 41 42 SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library. 43 44 August, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net. 45 46 October, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support, 47 curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000 lines of 48 code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of 49 "copyleft". 50 51 November, configure script and reported successful compiles on several 52 major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and 53 curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added. 54 55 Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man 56 page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it. 57 58 1999 59 ---- 60 61 January, DICT support added. 62 63 OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned. 64 65 May, first Debian package. 66 67 August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits 68 weekly. 69 70 Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code. 71 72 December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services 73 for managing the project. 74 75 2000 76 ---- 77 78 Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface. 79 The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered 80 the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting 81 other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost 82 20000 lines of code. 83 84 August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly. 85 86 The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third 87 party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since 88 the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16 89 different bindings exist at the time of this writing. 90 91 September, kerberos4 support was added. 92 93 In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written 94 from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1. 95 96 2001 97 ---- 98 99 January, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or 100 MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL 101 in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from 102 people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using 103 libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is 104 deemed "GPL incompatible".) 105 106 curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This 107 also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of 108 code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul. 109 110 The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001. 111 112 August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and 113 more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD 114 ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation 115 contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have 116 never since got in touch again. 117 118 September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the 119 forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and 120 without much whistles. 121 122 2002 123 ---- 124 125 June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is 126 35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations 127 of CPUs and operating systems. 128 129 To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to 130 impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives 131 a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS 132 distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software. 133 134 September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license 135 only. 136 137 2003 138 ---- 139 140 January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds. 141 142 February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment, 143 there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site. 144 145 Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June) 146 and Negotiate (June). 147 148 November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors 149 to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors. 150 151 December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported. 152 153 2004 154 ---- 155 156 January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support. 157 158 June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors. 159 160 This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the 161 curl_formparse() function 162 163 August: 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: 26 172 173 2005 174 ---- 175 176 April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is 177 built. 178 179 September: TFTP support was added. 180 181 More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors. 182 183 December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow 184 185 2006 186 ---- 187 188 January. We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation 189 that turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that 190 nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it. 191 192 March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow 193 194 April: Added the multi_socket() API 195 196 September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the 197 removal of ftp third party transfer support. 198 199 November: Added SCP and SFTP support 200 201 2007 202 ---- 203 204 February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff 205 206 July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification 207 208 2008 209 ---- 210 211 November: 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. 220 221 2009 222 ---- 223 224 March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access 225 226 August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name 227 228 December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP 229 230 2010 231 ---- 232 233 January: Added support for RTSP 234 235 February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length 236 237 March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS 238 for source code control 239 240 May: Added support for RTMP 241 242 Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff 243 244 August: 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) 254 255 2012 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. 264 265 2013 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. 276 277 2014 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
