5 \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
7 How cURL Became Like This
10 In the second half of 1997, Daniel Stenberg came up with the idea to make
11 currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
12 users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to
13 automate their retrieval.
15 Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that
16 Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written. After a few minor adjustments, it did
19 Soon, he found currencies on a GOPHER site, so support for that had to go in,
20 and not before long FTP download support was added as well. The name of the
21 project was changed to urlget to better fit what it actually did now, since
22 the http-only days were already passed.
24 The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the
25 name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20,
26 1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names were
29 (Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation filed a US
30 trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already
31 registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this
32 was much later brought into the lights.)
34 SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
36 August 1998, added project curl to freshmeat.net.
38 October 1998, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie
39 support, curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000
40 lines of code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
43 November 1998, configure script and reported successful compiles on several
44 major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and
45 curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser.
47 Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man
48 page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it.
50 January 1999, DICT support added.
52 OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.
54 May 1999, first Debian package.
56 August 1999, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300
59 Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code.
61 December 28 1999, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its
62 services for managing the project.
64 Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface.
65 The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered
66 the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting
67 other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
70 August 2000, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.
72 The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third
73 party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since
74 the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16
75 different bindings exist at the time of this writing.
77 September 2000, kerberos4 support was added.
79 In November 2000 started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later
80 re-written from scratch again.
82 January 2001, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
83 MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL
84 in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from
85 people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using
86 libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is
87 deemed "GPL incompatible".)
89 curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This
90 also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
93 August 2001. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more
94 and more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD
95 ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation
96 contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have
97 never since got in touch again.
99 September 2001, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During
100 the forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
101 without much whistles.
103 June 2002, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
104 35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations
105 of CPUs and operating systems.
107 To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to
108 impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives
109 a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS
110 distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software.
112 September 2002, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT
115 February 2003, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given
116 moment, there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site.