The history of OpenSSL
The OpenSSL library is based on the SSLeay library by Eric Andrew Young. The eay in SSLeay stands for Eric Andrew Young. SSLeay’s development started in 1995 as an open source implementation of the SSL library. Back then, the NSS library was not available. Later, Tim Hudson joined the development team. But in 1998, both Eric and Tim were hired by the RSA Corporation and did not have time to develop SSLeay further.
SSLeay was forked as OpenSSL in 1998, which means that OpenSSL has become SSLeay’s successor. The initial founding members were Mark Cox, Ralf Engelschall, Stephen Henson, Ben Laurie, and Paul Sutton. The very first version of OpenSSL, numbered 0.9.1, was released on December 23, 1998, merely a week after Eric and Tim joined the RSA Corporation and effectively stopped working on SSLeay.
Over many years, a lot of people and companies contributed a lot of code and other work to OpenSSL. The list of contributing companies is impressive: Oracle, Siemens, Akamai, Red Hat, IBM, VMware, Intel, and Arm, among others.
Currently, OpenSSL development is managed by the OpenSSL Management Committee, which consists of seven members. The core development team, which has commit rights, consists of approximately 20 people. Only two people work full-time on OpenSSL. The other contributors either do so in their spare time or as a part of their work in the contributing companies.
The history of OpenSSL is interesting, but what does the future hold for it? Let’s find out about the latest changes in the toolkit.
