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. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu. 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 June 2000: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se" 85 86 August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly. 87 88 The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third 89 party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since 90 the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16 91 different bindings exist at the time of this writing. 92 93 September, kerberos4 support was added. 94 95 In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written 96 from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1. 97 98 2001 99 ---- 100 101 January, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or 102 MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL 103 in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from 104 people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using 105 libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is 106 deemed "GPL incompatible".) 107 108 curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This 109 also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of 110 code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul. 111 112 The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001. 113 114 August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and 115 more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD 116 ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation 117 contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have 118 never since got in touch again. 119 120 September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the 121 forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and 122 without much whistles. 123 124 2002 125 ---- 126 127 June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is 128 35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations 129 of CPUs and operating systems. 130 131 To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to 132 impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives 133 a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS 134 distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software. 135 136 September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license 137 only. 138 139 2003 140 ---- 141 142 January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds. 143 144 February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment, 145 there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site. 146 147 Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June) 148 and Negotiate (June). 149 150 November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors 151 to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors. 152 153 December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported. 154 155 2004 156 ---- 157 158 January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support. 159 160 June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors. 161 162 This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the 163 curl_formparse() function 164 165 August: 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: 26 174 175 2005 176 ---- 177 178 April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is 179 built. 180 181 September: TFTP support was added. 182 183 More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors. 184 185 December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow 186 187 2006 188 ---- 189 190 January. We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation 191 that turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that 192 nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it. 193 194 March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow 195 196 April: Added the multi_socket() API 197 198 September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the 199 removal of ftp third party transfer support. 200 201 November: Added SCP and SFTP support 202 203 2007 204 ---- 205 206 February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff 207 208 July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification 209 210 2008 211 ---- 212 213 November: 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. 222 223 2009 224 ---- 225 226 March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access 227 228 August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name 229 230 December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP 231 232 2010 233 ---- 234 235 January: Added support for RTSP 236 237 February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length 238 239 March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS 240 for source code control 241 242 May: Added support for RTMP 243 244 Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff 245 246 August: 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) 256 257 2012 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. 266 267 2013 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. 278 279 2014 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
