Funds, server hosting and more | Hacker News Reader

Funds, server hosting and more

curl.se

102 pointsdsr1214 comments

It’s absolutely incredible that such a critical piece of infrastructure has to make such an announcement. Many companies that depend on Curl would spend $12K on a new rug for the office.

> Many companies that depend on Curl would spend $12K on a new rug for the office.

The message states that the project has USD100k at the moment, thanks to "a fair amount of sponsors".

Here's a link to curl's sponsors:

https://opencollective.com/curl

The estimated annual budget is listed at around USD 74k.

I was very disappointed that none of the FANGs is listed as a sponsor.

Hah, this is painfully true. Humans truly are strange creatures. They will justify splurges on things like $250,000 race cars, but won't give $3 for something that their company might implode without. Freeloading without even knowing it.

You care when you lose something usually.

I couldn't support this more. Daniel has done a fantastic job and if the project has money it should pay for yhd hosting and admin.

I would say that as any small "business" matures it should start paying for all the stuff that others are paying (directly or indirectly).

Apart from anything else it encourages long-term sustainability that outlast individuals.

Daniel has sincerely enriched all of our lives, and I will support him with virtually any decision he makes. I'm not entirely sure what he means in this by "server hosting and management" though. Like, will he operate a data center? Is there context for this that I haven't read about?

There is some amount of non-trivial work that goes into keeping the lights on for a large and popular project such as this. I imagine the $12k/yr goes to paying for his time and availability to manage this setup with a small portion of that paying for what is not sponsored directly. There are also probably other hosted services that this would cover.

$1,000/mo is such a small amount in the grand scheme of things, a rounding error to even a medium-sized, revenue-generating company.

"Server" in this context isn't just the front-end website (which is on Fastly), it include things like automatic builds (https://curl.se/dev/builds.html) and the mailing list, which would probably cost a bit of money (even if it's offloaded to dedicated services). $1,000 is actually a decent amount if you include the internal infrastructure that makes curl possible.

They should get whatever they ask for. There isn't a workday where I don't think to myself Man, we'd be so screwed if curl didn't exist. It runs more business than Excel. If there ever was a Log4j style CVE in curl I'd just become a fisherman or a blacksmith.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

He once referred to this on Twitter stating that he's not from Nebraska

Edit: found it: https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1295632478955286528

Their hosting and mailing lists appear to be donated, so is the $12K just for labor?

"I have spent my own personal money to pay for the curl server and I've spent my own (spare) time on its maintanence now for over twenty years"

So some of the hosting is paid by him directly

But.... what part? All their hosting that I could find is donated. I think he's talking about past hosting, as in, he wants to get reimbursed for previous hosting costs, not current ones.

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