SSLEAY was founded in 1998 by Eric Andrew Young[ and Tim J. Hudson as an SSL 3.0 implementation using RC2 and RC4 encryption. They preferred the name pronounced as each letter, s-s-l-e-a-y the project was first developed by Eric A. Young (“eay”).
The development of SSLeay unofficially ended, and volunteers forked the project under the OpenSSL name around December 1998, Tim and Eric both commenced working for RSA Security in Australia.
These days the site lives on to educate the world about SSL, and is spontaneously updated and maintained by Steve Mason, if you’d like to say thanks to Steve you drop him a comment on one of the articles.