1 How curl Became Like This 2 ========================= 3 4 Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot 5 for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make 6 currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) 7 users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to 8 automate their retrieval. 9 10 Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that 11 Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently release version 0.1 of. After 12 a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed. 13 14 1997 15 ---- 16 17 HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support. 18 19 We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP 20 download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0 21 was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed. 22 23 1998 24 ---- 25 26 The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the 27 name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20, 28 1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was 29 kept.) 30 31 (Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US 32 trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already 33 registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this 34 was revealed to us much later.) 35 36 SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library. 37 38 August, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net. 39 40 October, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support, 41 curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000 lines of 42 code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of 43 "copyleft". 44 45 November, configure script and reported successful compiles on several 46 major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and 47 curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added. 48 49 Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man 50 page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it. 51 52 1999 53 ---- 54 55 January, DICT support added. 56 57 OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned. 58 59 May, first Debian package. 60 61 August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits 62 weekly. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu. 63 64 Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code. 65 66 December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services 67 for managing the project. 68 69 2000 70 ---- 71 72 Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface. 73 The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered 74 the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting 75 other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost 76 20000 lines of code. 77 78 June 2000: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se" 79 80 August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly. 81 82 The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third 83 party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since 84 the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16 85 different bindings exist at the time of this writing. 86 87 September, kerberos4 support was added. 88 89 In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written 90 from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1. 91 92 2001 93 ---- 94 95 January, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or 96 MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL 97 in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from 98 people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using 99 libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is 100 deemed "GPL incompatible".) 101 102 curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This 103 also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of 104 code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul. 105 106 The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001. 107 108 August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and 109 more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD 110 ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation 111 contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have 112 never since got in touch again. 113 114 September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the 115 forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and 116 without much whistles. 117 118 2002 119 ---- 120 121 June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is 122 35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations 123 of CPUs and operating systems. 124 125 To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to 126 impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives 127 a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS 128 distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software. 129 130 September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license 131 only. 132 133 2003 134 ---- 135 136 January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds. 137 138 February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment, 139 there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site. 140 141 Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June) 142 and Negotiate (June). 143 144 November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors 145 to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors. 146 147 December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported. 148 149 2004 150 ---- 151 152 January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support. 153 154 June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors. 155 156 This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the 157 curl_formparse() function 158 159 August: 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: 26 168 169 2005 170 ---- 171 172 April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is 173 built. 174 175 April: Added the multi_socket() API 176 177 September: TFTP support was added. 178 179 More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors. 180 181 December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow 182 183 2006 184 ---- 185 186 January. We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation 187 that turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that 188 nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it. 189 190 March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow 191 192 September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the 193 removal of ftp third party transfer support. 194 195 November: Added SCP and SFTP support 196 197 2007 198 ---- 199 200 February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff 201 202 July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification 203 204 2008 205 ---- 206 207 November: 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. 216 217 2009 218 ---- 219 220 March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access 221 222 August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name 223 224 December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP 225 226 2010 227 ---- 228 229 January: Added support for RTSP 230 231 February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length 232 233 March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS 234 for source code control 235 236 May: Added support for RTMP 237 238 Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff 239 240 August: 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) 250 251 2012 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. 260 261 2013 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. 272 273 2014 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
