The Pressure

There are a lot of posts from prominent open source maintainers about this topic and from a far away, I always wonder if the solution is actually simpler than they want to admit: treat the project like a real business.

`curl` (and similarly important projects) have a tremendous leverage with the big tech and I don't see any of them on curl's sponsors page. Why not?

The sales pitch (and yes, treating the project like a business implies sales) would be simple: we are curl, you depend on us, pay us 1M/anually and with that money we'll hire the experts that we need to continue the development and support of the project. Raise a few millions (recurring) and secure the project's financial stability. Pay yourself a respectable salary, hire people. If "the big tech" refuses, publicly call them out on it. Connect with other prominent projects and act together. The internet depends on you, you should be awarded.

I have a tremendous respect for curl as a project and Daniel as a person (based on his writtings, never met him) and I know it's easy to comment out the stuff on the internet from a safe distance, but I still wonder if things could be actually different.

I would too suffer from fatigue from getting a wall of text every day where the effort to produce it might have been a coffee run, and I'd have to sift through it as it claims to end the world as we know it.

This is more than grind...

I'm a simpleton whose curl experience is things like `curl -O https://mysite.com/page.html`

So I started to write a question about what makes curl such a complex application, that requires decades of dedicated development etc

But then I just looked at the man page (https://curl.se/docs/man page.html) and it is quite apparent that it's an enormously complex and capable tool. Support for tons of protocols, certs, and much more. And, as the article says, it runs on every operating system and architecture.

Evidently, it's a eminent example of one of those forgotten yet ubiquitous xkcd dependencies upon which the rest of the software world sits.

It's an absolute disgrace that the maintainers have to essentially beg for support like this, in a world where a trillion dollars is being lit aflame to produce little of value.