5 \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
7 How cURL Became Like This
8 =========================
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.
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.
23 HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.
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.
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
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.)
42 SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
44 August, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.
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
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.
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.
61 January, DICT support added.
63 OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.
65 May, first Debian package.
67 August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits
70 Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code.
72 December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services
73 for managing the project.
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
84 August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.
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.
91 September, kerberos4 support was added.
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.
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".)
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.
110 The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001.
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.
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.
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.
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.
134 September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license
140 January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.
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.
145 Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June)
146 and Negotiate (June).
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.
151 December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.
156 January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.
158 June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors.
160 This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the
161 curl_formparse() function
163 August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1
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
176 April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is
179 September: TFTP support was added.
181 More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors.
183 December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow
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.
192 March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow
194 April: Added the multi_socket() API
196 September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the
197 removal of ftp third party transfer support.
199 November: Added SCP and SFTP support
204 February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff
206 July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification
213 Command line options: 128
214 curl_easy_setopt() options: 158
215 Public functions in libcurl: 58
216 Known libcurl bindings: 37
219 145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded.
224 March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access
226 August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name
228 December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP
233 January: Added support for RTSP
235 February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length
237 March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS
238 for source code control
240 May: Added support for RTMP
242 Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff
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
253 Gopher support added (re-added actually)
258 July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL
259 (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend).
263 October: SSH-agent support.
268 February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking
269 approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper.
271 September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2.
273 October: Removed krb4 support.
275 December: Happy eyeballs.
280 March: first real release supporting HTTP/2
282 September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data