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 were 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 released 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 and 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 September: Released curl 6.0. 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: 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 be based on and powered by libcurl. Almost 76 20000 lines of code. 77 78 June: 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 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 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 March 22: curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7. 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 The first experimental ftps:// support was added. 106 107 August: curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and 108 more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD 109 ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation 110 contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have 111 never since got back in touch again. 112 113 September: libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the 114 forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and 115 without many whistles. 116 117 2002 118 ---- 119 120 June: the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is 121 35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations 122 of CPUs and operating systems. 123 124 To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to 125 impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives 126 a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS 127 distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software. 128 129 September: with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license 130 only. 131 132 2003 133 ---- 134 135 January: Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds. 136 137 February: the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment, 138 there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site. 139 140 Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June) 141 and Negotiate (June). 142 143 November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors 144 to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors. 145 146 December: full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported. 147 148 2004 149 ---- 150 151 January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support. 152 153 June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors. 154 155 This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the 156 curl_formparse() function 157 158 August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1 159 160 Public curl release number: 82 161 Releases counted from the very beginning: 109 162 Available command line options: 96 163 Available curl_easy_setopt() options: 120 164 Number of public functions in libcurl: 36 165 Amount of public web site mirrors: 12 166 Number of known libcurl bindings: 26 167 168 2005 169 ---- 170 171 April: GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is 172 built. 173 174 April: Added the multi_socket() API 175 176 September: TFTP support was added. 177 178 More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors. 179 180 December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow 181 182 2006 183 ---- 184 185 January: We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation 186 that turned out to have been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that 187 nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it. 188 189 March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow 190 191 September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the 192 removal of ftp third party transfer support. 193 194 November: Added SCP and SFTP support 195 196 2007 197 ---- 198 199 February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff 200 201 July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification 202 203 2008 204 ---- 205 206 November: 207 208 Command line options: 128 209 curl_easy_setopt() options: 158 210 Public functions in libcurl: 58 211 Known libcurl bindings: 37 212 Contributors: 683 213 214 145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded. 215 216 2009 217 ---- 218 219 March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access 220 221 August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name 222 223 December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP 224 225 2010 226 ---- 227 228 January: Added support for RTSP 229 230 February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length 231 232 March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS 233 for source code control 234 235 May: Added support for RTMP 236 237 Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff 238 239 August: 240 241 Public curl releases: 117 242 Command line options: 138 243 curl_easy_setopt() options: 180 244 Public functions in libcurl: 58 245 Known libcurl bindings: 39 246 Contributors: 808 247 248 Gopher support added (re-added actually, see January 2006) 249 250 2012 251 ---- 252 253 July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL 254 (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend). 255 256 Supports metalink 257 258 October: SSH-agent support. 259 260 2013 261 ---- 262 263 February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking 264 approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper. 265 266 September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2. 267 268 October: Removed krb4 support. 269 270 December: Happy eyeballs. 271 272 2014 273 ---- 274 275 March: first real release supporting HTTP/2 276 277 September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data 278 279 2016 280 ---- 281 282 December: curl 7.52.0 introduced support for HTTPS-proxy! 283 284 2017 285 ---- 286 287 September: Added Multi-SSL support 288 289 The web site serves 3100 GB/month 290 291 Public curl releases: 169 292 Command line options: 211 293 curl_easy_setopt() options: 249 294 Public functions in libcurl: 74 295 Contributors: 1609 296
