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 details.

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

 Free Software
 Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor
 Boston, MA 02110-1301
 USA 

12.2. History

A long time ago, there was the Internet Junkbuster, by Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters Corporation. This 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 ads on users, give up autonomy over their browsing, and for tracking them, keeps 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 version, 3.0, was released August, 2002.

12.3. Authors

Current Privoxy Team:

 Fabian Keil, lead developer
 David Schmidt, developer
 Hal Burgiss
 Mark Miller
 Gerry Murphy
 Lee Rian
 Roland Rosenfeld

Former Privoxy Team Members:

 Johny Agotnes
 Rodrigo Barbosa
 Moritz Barsnick
 Ian Cummings
 Brian Dessent
 Jon Foster
 Karsten Hopp
 Alexander Lazic
 Daniel Leite
 Gábor Lipták
 Adam Lock
 Guy Laroche
 Justin McMurtry
 Andreas Oesterhelt
 Haroon Rafique
 Georg Sauthoff
 Thomas Steudten
 Jörg Strohmayer
 Rodney Stromlund
 Sviatoslav Sviridov
 Sarantis Paskalis
 Stefan Waldherr

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

 Ken Arromdee
 Devin Bayer
 Havard Berland
 Gergely Bor
 Francois Botha
 Reiner Buehl
 Andrew J. Caines
 Clifford Caoile
 Wan-Teh Chang
 Billy Crook
 Frédéric Crozat
 Michael T. Davis
 Mattes Dolak
 Matthias Drochner
 Peter E.
 Florian Effenberger
 Markus Elfring
 Dean Gaudet
 Stephen Gildea
 Daniel Griscom
 Felix Gröbert
 Jeff H.
 Aaron Hamid
 Darel Henman
 Magnus Holmgren
 Eric M. Hopper
 Ralf Horstmann
 Stefan Huehner
 Peter Hyman
 Derek Jennings
 Petr Kadlec
 David Laight
 Bert van Leeuwen
 Don Libes
 Paul Lieverse
 Han Liu
 Toby Lyward
 Wil Mahan
 Jindrich Makovicka
 Raphael Marichez
 Francois Marier
 David Mediavilla
 Raphael Moll
 Amuro Namie
 Adam Piggott
 Petr Písar
 Dan Price
 Roberto Ragusa
 Félix Rauch
 Maynard Riley
 Chung-chieh Shan
 Spinor S.
 Bart Schelstraete
 Dan Stahlke
 Oliver Stoeneberg
 Peter Thoenen
 Martin Thomas
 Bobby G. Vinyard
 Jochen Voss
 Glenn Washburn
 Song Weijia
 Jörg Weinmann
 Darren Wiebe
 Anduin Withers
 Oliver Yeoh
 Jamie Zawinski

Privoxy is based in part on code originally developed by Junkbusters Corp. and Anonymous Coders.

Privoxy heavily relies on Philip Hazel's PCRE.

The code to filter compressed content makes use of zlib which is written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler.

On systems that lack snprintf(), Privoxy is using a version written by Mark Martinec. On systems that lack strptime(), Privoxy is using the one from the GNU C Library written by Ulrich Drepper.