Copyright © 2001-2009 by Privoxy Developers <ijbswa-developers@lists.sourceforge.net>
Some source code is based on code Copyright © 1997 by Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters, Inc. and licensed under the GNU General Public 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
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.
Current Privoxy Team:
Fabian Keil, lead developer
David Schmidt, developer
Hal Burgiss
Mark Miller
Gerry Murphy
Lee Rian
Roland Rosenfeld
Jörg Strohmayer
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
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
Gergely Bor
Reiner Buehl
Andrew J. Caines
Clifford Caoile
Frédéric Crozat
Michael T. Davis
Mattes Dolak
Matthias Drochner
Peter E.
Florian Effenberger
Markus Elfring
Dean Gaudet
Stephen Gildea
Daniel Griscom
Felix Gröbert
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
Toby Lyward
Wil Mahan
Jindrich Makovicka
David Mediavilla
Raphael Moll
Amuro Namie
Adam Piggott
Dan Price
Roberto Ragusa
Félix Rauch
Maynard Riley
Chung-chieh Shan
Spinor S.
Bart Schelstraete
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.