12. Privoxy Copyright, License and History

12.1. License

Privoxy is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details, which is available from the Free Software Foundation, Inc, 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the

 Free Software
 Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330
 Boston, MA 02111-1307
 USA 

12.2. History

In the beginning, there was the Internet Junkbuster, by Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters Corporation. It saved many users a lot of pain in the early days of web advertising and user tracking.

But the web, its protocols and standards, and with it, the techniques for forcing users to consume ads, give up autonomy over their browsing, and for spying on them, kept evolving. Unfortunately, the Internet Junkbuster did not. Version 2.0.2, published in 1998, was (and is) the last official release available from Junkbusters Corporation. Fortunately, it had been released under the GNU GPL, which allowed further development by others.

So Stefan Waldherr started maintaining an improved version of the software, to which eventually a number of people contributed patches. It could already replace banners with a transparent image, and had a first version of pop-up killing, but it was still very closely based on the original, with all its limitations, such as the lack of HTTP/1.1 support, flexible per-site configuration, or content modification. The last release from this effort was version 2.0.2-10, published in 2000.

Then, some developers picked up the thread, and started turning the software inside out, upside down, and then reassembled it, adding many new features along the way.

The result of this is Privoxy, whose first stable release, 3.0, was released August, 2002.

12.3. Authors

Current Project Developers:

 Jon Foster
 Andreas Oesterhelt
 Stefan Waldherr
 
 Thomas Steudten
 Rodney Stromlund

Current Project Contributors:

 Rodrigo Barbosa (RPM specfiles)
 Moritz Barsnick
 Hal Burgiss (docs)
 Karsten Hopp (Red Hat)
 Alexander Lazic
 Gábor Lipták
 Guy
 Haroon Rafique
 Roland Rosenfeld (Debian)
 Georg Sauthoff (Gentoo)
 David Schmidt (OS/2, Mac OSX ports)
 Joerg Strohmayer (Amiga)
 Sarantis Paskalis

Based in part on code originally developed by:

 Junkbusters Corp.
 Anonymous Coders

Thanks to the many people who have tested Privoxy, reported bugs, or made suggestions. These include (in alphabetical order):

 Ken Arromdee
 Devin Bayer
 Reiner Buehl
 Andrew J. Caines
 Clifford Caoile
 Michael T. Davis
 Peter E
 Aaron Hamid
 Magnus Holmgren
 Daniel Leite
 Paul Lieverse
 Roberto Ragusa
 Maynard Riley
 Bart Schelstraete
 Darren Wiebe
 jwz