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Step 1: Set up a GoFundMe

Step 2: Announce that, until the aforementioned GoFundMe reaches $10 million, all new commits to curl will be licensed under the AGPL.

Step 3: Profit

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Step 3: get forked and lose?

Step 4: it's someone else's problem, win

If they didn't want to keep maintaining it, they could just skip to step 4 and just not maintain it in the first place. The problem is that they do want to, and it's not like they haven't done it successfully for years now . Between "put up with whatever bullshit comes your way" and "give up entirely" is a wide spectrum of "try to find ways to reduce the bullshit to get to focus on the important parts", and most of the ways probably don't boil down to handful of pithy steps that could fit in an (original size) tweet.

If someone competent wanted to take over my important work projects (deployment systems, core code maintenance, etc.), I'd gladly hand them over. I could orphan them right now claiming I need time for immediate tasks, but I don't want to dump unmaintained code on my team. I'd guess open source maintainers feel even more responsible since they see their work as community service. Maybe dropping the project is what's needed to trigger a well-funded fork or get corporate attention, similar to how Heartbleed affected OpenSSL.

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