It was developed by Eric Andrew Young[1] and Tim J. Hudson as an SSL 3.0 implementation using RC2 and RC4 encryption.
Development of SSLeay unofficially mostly ended, and volunteers forked the project under the OpenSSL banner around December 1998, when Hudson and Young both commenced working for RSA Security in Australia.
Patches to open source applications to support SSL using SSLeay were produced by Tim Hudson.
[1] The first open source Certifying Authority implementation was created with CGI scripts using SSLeay by Clifford Heath.
[3][9] After Young and Hudson joined RSA Corporation, volunteers forked SSLeay and continued development as OpenSSL.