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Comment by lysium | Hacker News Reader

It’s a well written article. I did not get the point where the internet relies on people working for free. Yes, free software such as curl is in use, but where does the internet rely on it? If there were no curl, there would be something else, wouldn’t it?

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What would the world look like if all volunteering stopped? Would society have reached the point it is today? Volunteer encompasses all kinds of areas, including software and research. It can be argued that some segments would be covered by for-profit organizations, but decisions in this area is often driven by the return on investment (ROI). This means that some solutions would likely be paid or not pass the potential ROI test. If it became paid, it would likely be a barriers of entries to a lot of people, leading to slower integration and growth of the platform, software, etc.

I was not arguing against volunteering. From the article, I just did not understand what was described in the title. I’m glad there is so much volunteering, I think the current climate crisis shows that capitalism cannot work for everything.

And if that replacement were not free then the costs would have to be passed on.

There is a tremendous amount of free software that runs the worlds infrastructure.

Programming languages, compilers, libraries, frameworks, text editors, databases, operating systems, utilities, servers, encryption, and even curl all lower the price of entry for everyone to contribute and innovate, even when they’re using free tools for commercial purposes.

I’m glad there is so much free software! I think this shows how superior this volunteer model is over, say, a capitalist approach.

libcurl is widely used and, along with the curl cli, is bundled with most linux/unix installations; it's installed on nearly every consumer device in the wild, including things like cars on the road. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/09/17/

The article's point is that the reason curl is so widely used by almost everything is because it's free and has a open source license. If it requires some small amount of money per commercial install, or even if it had some license terms that weren't appealing to legal teams at these companies, it would likely not have the widespread adoption is currently has. If every piece of curl-like software in the space were pay-per-install, these companies probably would go and use one of them, but if just one of the offerings is free for all use it's going to top the paid offerings most of the time.

>>there would be something else, wouldn’t it?

ummm, the gist of it is, someone else have to write for free, else every time you curl you would be paying $$ to oracle or someone :|

Oh, that was not clear to me! Thanks for clarifying! I was wondering where the downvotes came for my honest question.

Nobody had to write it for free. They could have sold it instead. They could also charge users for maintenance.

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