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Comment by NiekvdMaas | Hacker News Reader

And how many of those have >10 billion installs?

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/10/15/curl-installations-pe...

I'm going to ask a really silly question, how do open source maintainers make a living, compared to the commercial MS Windows world?

how do open source maintainers make a living

Most who make a living out of it work on the project as part of their jobs at larger tech companies or universities. A few manage to start a company around that project and make a living selling various licenses and support. A tiny number manage to (at least temporarily) scrape together a living from donations.

For a large number of them however being an open source maintainer is an unpaid hobby they do on their evenings and weekends.

You can read it in the words of Daniel Stenberg himself:

https://un.curl.dev/money

it was simply developed at the right time to become the de-facto command-line utility.

But it should be a solved problem by now. No need for continuous full-time work.

It isn't a solved problem because standards are evolving. The most noticeable ones are related to encryption, but there are also HTTP2, WebSockets, QUIC and other protocols you need to speak on the web.

WebSocket isn't supported by curl.

HTTP 2/3 are mostly bad ideas (slightly less bad in the case of 3, but still overkill) pushed by Google to optimize an edge case no one but web browsers care about.

curl doesn't fully support HTTP 3 regardless.

> WebSocket isn't supported by curl.

Not yet in command-line, but libcurl has support. Besides, that's the task to work on full-time :)

https://curl.se/docs/websocket.html

> to optimize an edge case no one but web browsers care about.

I'd argue there are no reasonable use-cases for HTTP except web browsers.

Yes. By curl.

Every time comments like yours come up I'm just thinking "yeah, the fucker have no idea how much handling of edge cases comes up with libs like that"

I have implemented many networking applications from Ethernet to application protocols. I am also particularly aware of how HTTP and all the related stack works.

So your thinking appears to be inaccurate.

Isn't that just one side of the coin? The other being hardware compatibility.

There is nothing hardware-specific here.

Is not the solution called curl :)

> No need for continuous full-time work.

Probably not full-time, but some software are never done

"I work for wolfSSL doing commercial curl support. If you need help to fix curl problems, fix your app's use of libcurl, add features to curl, fix curl bugs, optimize your curl use or libcurl education for your developers... Then I'm your man. Contact us!"

From his website. They wouldn't give him a full-time position if there wasn't enough to do.

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