I almost forgot, but I recently re-discovered that I once contributed to the developement of the shapelibe libraries http://shapelib.maptools.org/ – see the “Credits”

Credits
I didn't start this section anywhere near soon enough, so alot of earlier contributors to Shapelib are lost in pre-history.

    Bill Miller (NY-DOT) for shputils.c
    Carl Anderson for the contents of the contrib directory, and the "tuple" additions to dbfopen.c.
    Andrea Giacomelli for patches for dbfopen.c.
    Doug Matthews for portability improvements.
    Jan-Oliver Wagner for convincing me to make it available under LGPL, shared library support, and various other patches.
    Dennis Christopher (of Avenza) for testing and bug fixes.
    Miko Syrjä (of 3D-system Oy) for a record size bug fix.
    Steven Lime and Curtis Hill for help with NULL shapes.
    Jim Matthews for support of NULL attributes in dbf files.
    PCI Geomatics who let me release a modified version of their shapefile code in the beginning and who hosted shapelib for years.