Those who are unfamiliar with and/or are educating themselves in regards to Technology may be pondering the question, “What is SSLeay?” By definition, it is a form of open-source secure sockets layer (SSL) implementation. The technology was initially developed in 1995 by Tim J. Hudson and Eric Andrew Young as an SSL 3.0 implementation using RC2 and RC4 encryption. The concept was developed by Young and Windows support was provided by Hudson. Generally, SSLeay is pronounced by clearly stating each letter. The impetus of the idea is also based upon the implementation of the data encryption standard (DES), which originated from earlier work by Young and was believed to be the first open-source implementation of DES.
Hudson also developed patches intended to support SSL via open-source applications using SSLeay. The SSLeay library, along with its codebase, is licensed under its own SSLeay License, which is a form of free software license. SSLeay was licensed under a BSD-style open-source license, which comes from a family of permissive free software licenses. These public domain licenses impose minimal restrictions on the use and redistribution of the covered content. The acronym stems from its namesake, which is Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The purpose of the BSD license stands in contrast to copyleft licenses, which possess reciprocity share-alike requirements. BSD open-source licenses have been revised from their original formulation and the resulting deviations are now referred to as modified BSD licenses.
In 1998, the development of SSLeay by Young and Hudson ceased when both innovators started working for RSA Security in Australia. However, the application was continued in the form of OpenSSL, which is a fork (when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and utilize it in the independent development of another distinct and separate piece of software) and successor project to SSLeay and has a similar interface to it.
