v11.0.504

C-Kermit 11.0 (11.0.504)

Dedication

I dedicate this release of C-Kermit to Frank da Cruz.

Frank was directly involved with Kermit for 44 years, from its initial design in 1981 all the way through 2025. He maintained Kermit as an Open Source project after Columbia University ended its sponsorship. I know of no other Open Source project where the founder remains so personally involved for so long.

When Kermit was begun, transfers between different hardware and operating systems were difficult or impossible. Frank helped build a bridge. Kermit glued systems together, from the International Space Station to pocket calculators, and set a new standard for interoperability. It continues to do so.

Kermit is still one of the quietly-working pillars of computing today, enabling everything from firmware upgrades to radios. And, yes, it still reliably transfers files over serial lines.

As we start to spend a lot of time in the Kermit codebase, we do so standing on the shoulders of a giant. Thanks, Frank, for your decades of work on Kermit.

-- John Goerzen, July 2026

Summary

This is a major new release, the first non-beta since the last 9.x release in 2022. It represents a major effort to modernize and improve the C-Kermit codebase.

Since all C-Kermit 10.x releases were betas, some people may be upgrading from 9.x and others from 10.x. Since some changes were labeled as "9.x DEV" or various alphas, but also never released, I indicate in which version a change was made with "9", "10", and "11" tags accordingly. Please see the history and FAQ pages for more information on the relationship between the different Kermit versions.

Because the entire list of changes is many pages long, it isn't included here. Please see the changelog file for all the details. There are significant improvements in C-Kermit 11.0!