https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1034966/211fbb4c26d179a3/
"Keynote sessions at Open Source Summit events tend not to allow much time for
detailed talks, and the 2025 Open Source Summit Europe did not diverge from
that pattern. Even so, Daniel Stenberg, the maintainer of the curl project,
managed to cram a lot into the 15 minutes given to him. Like the maintainers of
many other projects, Stenberg is feeling some stress, and the problems appear
to be getting worse over time.
Curl, he began, is 'a small project with a big impact'. It began in 1996 with
all of 100 lines of code; it has since grown to 180,000 lines that have been
contributed by 1,400 authors. In any given month, there are 20-25 developers
who are actively contributing to curl. The project has exactly one full-time
employee — that being Stenberg himself.
The program is widely used, having been deployed in at least one-billion
devices. Just about anything that occasionally connects to the net, he said,
uses curl to do it. But using curl is different from supporting its
development. As an example, he put up a slide listing the 47 car brands that
use curl in their products; he followed it with a slide listing the brands that
contribute to curl. The second slide, needless to say, was empty.
Companies tend to assume that somebody else is paying for the development of
open-source software, so they do not have to contribute. He emphasized that he
has released curl under a free license, so there is no legal problem with what
these companies are doing. But, he suggested, these companies might want to
think a bit more about the future of the software they depend on."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
