Bloomberg sponsors curl with 10K USD | Hacker News Reader

Bloomberg sponsors curl with 10K USD

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You ungrateful nerds.

Kudos to Bloomberg for doing this, and whoever championed it inside the company. Now if more companies would do the same we might be getting somewhere.

This! What all these ungrateful nerds seem to disregard is whether one company should take the responsibility of paying the curl author enough to match a year's worth of salary? Or should more companies (and there are many that make much bigger revenues) each contribute 10K to this project to total a year's worth of salary?

You don’t get to decide on someone’s salary for this kind of work. The value should be determined by the market. If 10,000 big companies find curl useful and they all value on a $10,000 contribution then curl should receive 100 million.

Of course, I don't get to decide it. That's exactly my point! You seem to be restating my point. Each company is free to decide for themselves how much they want to contribute.

No I'm not. I'm disagreeing with you because you seem to have the assumption it's for a year's salary. But this isn't a salary job, it's work that's valuable. So it shouldn't limited to someone's decision about a salary because you're not employing him. It's just however much he can make.

I am making no such assumption. I am only expressing my gripe against those commenters who are not happy that this grant is like 1 month's salary. So I am only making the point that it may not be one company's responsibility to pay enough money to equal any number of months or years of salary. On the other hand any single company is free to pay as littile or as much money as they want and if all companies did the same thing then it might be enough money to appease some of these commenters who seem to expect that the developers should be paid much more than a month's worth of salary.

I am personally all for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars if the companies are up for it.

> … like 1 month's salary

Mm, ok, sure, yeah. Well, I just don’t think salary is what we should benchmark it off.

> … equal any number of months or …

I agree it’s not. But for two reasons, one we shouldn’t be benchmarking it off salary. Two: companies should pay what they value, not about salary. It could be a lot more than salary. It could be a lot less. It should be: What’s the value of this OSS to the company?

> … appease …

Sure, right? I just think let’s not keep talking about salary. This is a different costing.

> … 100s 1000s or even 1000000s …

Great, man! Me too ;p :) xx ;p

Yep. And people don't realize how difficult it can be in a large company to get finance to pay up for something like this.

Years ago before I was at the Free Software Foundation, they offered a bundle of books and t-shirts and even compiled copies of free software to companies for a few thousand dollars because it was a way corporate departments could donate with a credit card by way of buying some merchandise. Later, this morphed into a straight-up donation program -- http://patron.fsf.org

Exactly. PR wise it seems to be safer to be in camp zero, than standout by giving something.

I'm only seeing two negative comments among like 15 positive ones. Maybe you jumped the gun a bit with the flaming.

When I posted there was 5 or 6 negatives and a neutral. Maybe you jumped the gun a bit with the judgment.

Fair enough.

Why the anger? It may not be a ton of money, but this is a lot more than what the utterly vast majority of companies do for the open source ecosystem they profit from.

The Curl author made the choice to give away his project for free, no one owes him money. So it is nice to see a company giving back, because they did not have to.

> The Curl author made the choice to give away his project for free, no one owes him money.

Technically true, yet in some cases I'm reminded of folks playing music for tips in public. No one enjoying the music owes the musician, though some of them could record / stream it (perhaps supplemented with commentary) for a profit. Would it be ethical for them to contribute nothing or only pennies?

Stream it for a “profit” of $0.06 per stream?

Ah yes, because /that's/ the important part of the argument.

> No one enjoying the music owes the musician, though some of them could record / stream it (perhaps supplemented with commentary) for a profit. Would it be ethical for them to contribute nothing or only pennies?

According to the sibling reply, if I gave the musician a penny, that would still be 167x more than he would get if I streamed his music.

>Stream it for a “profit” of $0.06 per stream?

You're missing a zero there, it's more like $0.006 per stream

https://edm.com/industry/how-much-each-streaming-platform-pa...

If the musician puts up a sign that says "Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this performance for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted", then yes, it would be ethical to record/stream it for profit - they've explicitly told you it's okay. Substituting "software" for "performance", that's what the curl license says.

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

The anger may stem from the fact that many entites feel like they're owed instant fixes, free support or backwards compatibility etc. from libre/open software. 10k$ doesn't come close to some demands people expect

However, I agree with the fact that it's nice that Bloomberg gives back and it may encourage people in other orgs to push their org to do the same.

This is why:

"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it"

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

Then this is the least big issue. Let’s all donate to oxfam or a similar org and solve world hunger first.

We’re all horrible for not donating. According to that interpretation

According to the "Copenhagen interpretation of ethics", if you do not donate, it's okay -- most people do not donate, so no one is going to blame you specifically. The normal behavior is never blameworthy.

The problem starts when you actually donate. Now you are in the spotlight, and people are going to judge you publicly for not donating enough, or donating to this instead of that, or maybe just for the fact that you are trying to solve problems by donating instead of promoting a worldwide proletarian revolution. Either way, you are the bad guy now.

(The "Copenhagen interpretation of ethics" is supposed to highlight a failure in our ethical reasoning, but one that most people make completely naturally.)

Bloomberg announcement about supporting open source projects

https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/bloomberg-ospo-lau...

This seems like the real story right here. It looks like the first grants went to curl, celery and apache arrow. I think it's great to see large companies doing this.

In my opinion, it's less about the amount and more about setting an example that this is something that moral companies should be doing.

My startup sponsors 25 projects/developers on Github [0], curl including, and none of them with a significant amount of money. However, if majority of companies that use OSS were to do so, the amount of funding would suddenly be a game-changer for almost all of these projects.

[0]: https://github.com/orgs/ProteinQure/sponsoring

My little one man agency supports 17 organizations now: https://github.com/orgs/A-Edge/sponsoring (+1 on OpenCollective)

Total amount was around $175/mo at one point, though recently I had to cut it back (now at $85, at $5/mo per project) when I switched from a paid project to a pre-revenue “startup” I'm now working on.

Not as sexy as $10'000 donations, of course :^) Hopefully I can scale it back up when my financial situation gets more sound.

A lot of people each pitching in an insignificant amount suddenly make up a ton. I think most of us have a Netflix subscription's worth to spare for the things that enable us to make money (but even less still totally matters).

$30,000 in total to the FOSS community-

$10,000 to CURL

$10,000 to Apache Arrow

$10,000 to Celery

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/bloomberg-ospo-lau...

Glad they sponsored a project like curl. Projects like Blender are cool but the world is held up by packages like curl that aren't cool to sponsor.

True. Unfortunately, there are many projects that are even unsexier and much less prominent than curl. I happen to maintain a project which is about as ubiquitous and only receives a fraction of curl's funding.

I think you could be bold and reach out to these companies (directly or via notices in the README, website, docs, install logs, etc) that you maintain these libraries and need money for it. Have developers champion for it, etc.

I think one of your issues is that your libraries are mainly used indirectly, e.g. a dependency on more prominent libraries / applications.

Dumb question - how much does the curl project need?

I see lots of people saying this is basically like crumbs for pigeons, but no idea what a fully funded curl project would be.

bagder could probably be a Staff level engineer at $BIGCORP, so at the very least, enough to pay him a hefty sum of money per year, plus all the overhead of actually running the project.

I'd rather the curl author receive various smaller donations from various companies than receive $BIGCORP donations from one company.

The former is at least somewhat resistant to conflicts of interest.

Then he should be a $POSITION at $BIGCORP. I don't think this is the correct way to determine how much money a project needs.

Exactly. Attitude here seems to be kicking gift horse in the mouth.

I see your point. It's very valid. At the same time, it would be nice for multi-billion dollar companies to dish out just a bit more than 10k, you know?

Unless you favor central planning economies, none of us except the developers have any say into what the project "needs". The better question are "what is the project worth?" and "how willing am I to take on the burden of supporting them?"

That's what I'm saying. Time allocation is a personal choice.

The value of his time is not, and time is not an infinite resource.

From what I read somewhere it's close to a full time job, so a typical tech salary would seem fair.

Without the open source community there would be no YC so i'm glad that at least some companies show courage.

Has there been any research done into quantifying the economic value of open source projects like curl?

Or even open source projects in general?

Good. Thank you. I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth here.

You, Daniel Stenberg, and the curl project (and I) seem to agree that's the appropriate reaction here.

Some other bystanders appear to disagree.

$10,000 > $0

It's not a lot but way better than most companies. I still don't think this is the proper way to earn enough dough for OSS people though.

Those are rookie numbers, Bloomberg. Gotta pump those numbers up.

Bloomberg is hardly the heaviest user of foss tech out here, and so far contributed 10k more than nearly all others.

Maybe we should scold those that do nothing rather than those who do something. 10k from all the companies the size of Bloomberg that use curl would be plenty.

Hooray. That'll pay for one developer for one month.

[insert mandatory "dependency" xkcd here]

Or 1/20 of a developer for 20 months.

Does a mature tool like curl really need a 100% full time employee? I don’t think so—that’s about 180 hours of development work per month. What updates does curl need to justify that amount of work, in perpetuity?

What I read of the developer's blog suggests that it does. In addition to the resolution of various vulnerabilities, web standards are constantly changing and updating, and curl has to keep up, which is pretty hard part-time.

Mature doesn't mean it's static.

I suggest scrolling through his blog a bit: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/

Doesn't need a full time dev.

Needs a part time dev, part time QA engineer, part time product manager, part time tech writer, and a part time solutions architect for downstream and upstream.

> Hooray. That'll pay for one developer for one month.

If 20 more companies did this, then it would pay for one developer for one year, don't you think?

Ungrateful nerds. This is capitalism, hence how we only give out scraps to beggars. It's like a beggar getting 10 cent coin and looking spitefully at the donor.

When is open-source going to admit they traded money for influence? Altruism is not a thing, people.

$10K from a company like Bloomberg making billions a year is like feeding leftover moulded crumbs to pigeons from the back garden of a palace.

Beggars can't be choosers, but better than nothing and will support the full time project maintainer for...another month.

Maybe you should direct your ire at Apple, which has 40 times the revenue of Bloomberg and has been actually shipping curl in their operating systems for 20 years without contributing a dime: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/09/25/curls-first-twenty-ye...

> They also made the exact code they used available.

It is unclear whether this is an ongoing contribution or was a one-time reveal after the first time Apple built curl for MacOS, but it seems unfair to say they never contributed anything except source code and exposure for a freely-licensed tool that says on the tin that you can do exactly all of the above.

Why do people take time creating open source code that says anyone can use it freely and then complain when anyone uses it freely?

Because people get jealous when they see others making money with their free code but they aren't, and they never really thought the ramification of the FOSS philosophy through.

I'm pretty sure the author knew ramifications of FOSS before many his critics here were even conceived. He had decades to abandon the project, this predatory behaviour is not new.

Well seeing that I was “conceived” around September of 1973 and I first “open sourced” code by submitting it via ftp to the Mac archive site in 1993, I am almost sure that is not the case.

It's good that I qualified my statement as "many" rather than "all" then. Something an extremely attentive reader such as you surely appreciated.

Clearly they don't, the only time I've heard anything about this was when Apple forwarded support requests for the version of open source software they packaged upstream (despite the usual "no guarantees" license), which is kind of scummy for a commercial company. Not illegal or a reason for billing them any money, just pretty scummy.

The GP complains that Bloomberg doesn't give away enough free money because it's a very profitable company. Apple, an even more profitable company, actually shipping the project this is about to their customers, pays even less. L

If there was some kind of expectation that big companies using open source would provide any support, I'd say that yes, Apple should definitely be looked at more sternly than Bloomberg. I don't think anyone is saying that here, though.

The curl author may not “expect” anything. But they seem to complain when they didn’t get anything.

> Neither me personally nor the project have ever gotten anything or any compensation from Apple.

They complain they get to effectively serve as Apple technical support, due to Apple's choice of shipping old versions of curl with their products. Which is fair.

Again they chose to release their product as open source. These are the consequences.

Releasing something open source does not mean the author has any responsibility for any amount of support, that's the "AS-IS" part of many FOSS licenses. It is ridiculous to present a certain amicability to supporting users as some form of indenture.

All I can imagine is some exec reading this and going "See??? We should've just donated nothing because the internet is ungrateful"

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