Yes, at this time of year people summarizes the year that passed and looks
ahead at what's to come. I'll try to make that as well:

 == Looking back ==

Christmas 1998:
 Released version: 5.3

Christmas 1999:
 Released version: 6.3.1

Christmas 2000:
 Released version: 7.5.1

 == The year 2000 at a glance ==

So it seems we've been keeping the pace of one major release number increase
every year. This year's bump from version 6 to version 7 is however the most
involved update in recent years when I rewrote the internals of the libcurl
to fit the design I had envisioned and discussed.

The new libcurl design has turned out to be at least partly successful as
more people than ever before are actually using libcurl in applications.

This year the curl web site moved physical location as I started working for
Contactor. We also registered the haxx.se domain and are replacing the former
domain with this. It is fascinating to see how long old domain names live on
various places on the net! The web site has developed extensively through the
year and, believe it or not, but there's now more than five times more
visitors on the curl web than it was only one year ago

The PHP4 module named CURL was introduced during the year and it brought
curl's abilities to the fingertips of the PHP programmers. This of course
helped boosting curl's popularity and fame. The first known paper books to
mention curl are PHP books...

More recently, the test suite (although not in any way "complete" yet) proved
to be even more useful than I had anticipated. I've detected numerous minor
problems thanks to it, and future development will be faster and done more
solidly thanks to the ability to quickly verify that most of the stuff is
working.

Authors of GPL software found libcurl and noticed it isn't "GPL compatible".
Much has been said about it, more will be said next year!

Last week 3800 archives were downloaded off the curl site. A quick guess that
90% of all people download archives from the curl site and 10% from the
mirrors, ends up on something like 17000 downloaded curl packages each month.

I've had my first consultant work doing curl fiddling, which inspires me a
lot and make me feel like we're getting the project sponsored.

... and personally, I got certified Master on advogato.org. Check out
http://advogato.org/person/bagder/

  == The future ==

The absolutely nearest future of course has a bugfix release in early January
2001 coming up.

Other things I expect the curl project to fix or at least take on during the
first months of 2001:

 - Dual licensing. Curl will be released under MPL *or* MIT/X. Check out
   http://curl.haxx.se/legal/ for details on my plans for this. This will
   make curl and libcurl "GPL compatible".

 - Full multiple download support. I expect the client to support them very
   early 2001 and the library to support many files on the same connection a
   few months later.

 - HTTPS session id support. Makes faster repeated connects to the same https
   site.

 - I expect even more downloads. The curl site gets more bandwidth early next
   year, and thanks to my new web scripts I hope to split some of the load
   off to other servers too. I hope to get more curl mirrors set up to even
   more distribute the downloads. To the benefit of the users of course.

 - I hope to see a bunch of new people doing project contributions! ;-)

I don't yet have a clear picture of what to expect for curl on the second
half of 2001. I expect more and more focus on the library as more people will
find use for it. We probably need to add functions and interfaces to it to
better allow all sorts of applications to easily fiddle with URLs and
transfers.

I expect to get enough suggestions and help from users and developers to keep
my spare time filled with as much curl hacking as I can stand! :-)

In the end, it's been a fun year and I expect the next to be at least as fun!
Merry christmas on you all!

-- 
  Daniel Stenberg -- curl project maintainer -- http://curl.haxx.se/