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, 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, 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. 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, developer
 David Schmidt, developer
 
 Hal Burgiss
 Ian Cummings
 Roland Rosenfeld

Former Privoxy Team Members:

 Johny Agotnes 
 Rodrigo Barbosa
 Moritz Barsnick
 Brian Dessent
 Jon Foster
 Karsten Hopp
 Alexander Lazic
 Daniel Leite
 Gßbor Liptßk
 Adam Lock
 Guy Laroche
 Mark Martinec 
 Andreas Oesterhelt
 Haroon Rafique
 Georg Sauthoff
 Thomas Steudten
 Joerg 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
 Reiner Buehl
 Andrew J. Caines
 Clifford Caoile
 FrΘdΘric Crozat
 Michael T. Davis
 Mattes Dolak 
 Peter E
 Florian Effenberger
 Dean Gaudet
 Aaron Hamid
 Darel Henman
 Magnus Holmgren
 Derek Jennings
 David Laight
 Don Libes  
 Paul Lieverse
 Jindrich Makovicka 
 David Mediavilla 
 Raphael Moll
 Oliver Stoeneberg
 Martin Thomas
 Roberto Ragusa
 FΘlix Rauch
 Maynard Riley
 Spinor S
 Bart Schelstraete
 Bobby G. Vinyard
 J÷rg Weinmann 
 Darren Wiebe
 Anduin Withers
 Oliver Yeoh
 Jamie Zawinski

Privoxy is based in part on code originally developed by:

 Junkbusters Corp.
 Anonymous Coders
 Ulrich Drepper
 Philip Hazel