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                          How cURL Became Like This


In the second half of 1997, Daniel Stenberg came up with the idea to make
currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to
automate their retrieval.

Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that
Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written. After a few minor adjustments, it did
just what he needed.

Soon, he found currencies on a GOPHER site, so support for that had to go in,
and not before long FTP download support was added as well. The name of the
project was changed to urlget to better fit what it actually did now, since
the http-only days were already passed.

The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the
name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20,
1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was
kept.)

(Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US
trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already
registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this
was revealed to us much later.)

SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.

August 1998, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.

October 1998, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie
support, curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000
lines of code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
"copyleft".

November 1998, configure script and reported successful compiles on several
major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and
curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added.

Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man
page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it.

January 1999, DICT support added.

OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.

May 1999, first Debian package.

August 1999, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300
visits weekly.

Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code.

December 28 1999, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its
services for managing the project.

Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface.
The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered
the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting
other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
20000 lines of code.

August 2000, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.

The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third
party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since
the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16
different bindings exist at the time of this writing.

September 2000, kerberos4 support was added.

In November 2000 started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later
re-written from scratch again.

January 2001, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL
in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from
people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using
libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is
deemed "GPL incompatible".)

curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This
also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
code.

The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001.

August 2001. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more
and more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD
ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation
contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have
never since got in touch again.

September 2001, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During
the forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
without much whistles.

June 2002, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations
of CPUs and operating systems.

To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to
impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives
a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS
distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software.

September 2002, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT
license only.

February 2003, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given
moment, there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site.

Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June)
and Negotiate (June).

November 2003: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique
visitors to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors.

December 2003, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.

January 2004: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.