IRsoft - Software and more by Ingmar Runge

yaSSL is an excellent yet rather unknown SSL library. It's a lot smaller than the popular OpenSSL and a lot easier to get started with than GNUTLS, especially on Windows.

Some weeks ago, I have been looking for an OpenSSL alternative for Good News as I didn't want to pollute the distribution with over one megabyte of SSL libraries. I stumbled across yaSSL (yet another SSL). As it seems to be rather fameless, I'd like to drop a few advertising words support this excellent project a bit.

First off, yaSSL is GNU GPL licensed, so it can only be used in applications and together with other libraries whose licenses are compatible with the GNU GPL. This statement invalidates if you are a company and would like to use yaSSL under a commercial license, which is also possible.

Very cool is that the latest yaSSL release plays together with libcurl very well (it (yaSSL 1.3.5, libcurl 7.15.4) doesn't yet while I am writing this post, but the yaSSL team is working on a fix (libcurl 7.15.3 is working fine)) through yaSSL's OpenSSL wrapper which is a set of *.h files which provide an OpenSSL-like interface.

The yassl.lib file ends up in adding roughly 150 KB to your binary. That's a lot less compared to OpenSSL.

So if you are going to create an Open Source application which needs a good SSL library, you certainly want to give yaSSL a shot.