The World Runs 20B Instances of Curl. Where's the Support?

Broadcom is perking their ears up now.

The topic is a bit tiring at least. You can't provide something for free and then complain. And let's not assume the world is incapable of writing an alternative. Open source authors deserve praise for their work and skill. But they also get quite a bit of recognition for it. It's not like they're enslaved. It's still a pretty good deal, and my own side projects landed me every good job I ever had.

People literally steal each other's food out of office fridges every day. These are colleagues that know each other on a first name basis. Human decency is an acquired taste and it doesn't reach as far as people assume.

Apple Support directing folks to curl's support page is most definitely a shining symbol of today's dystopian tech.

“ Today, it has 180,000 lines of code, generated by about 1,400 authors. In total, 30,500 people have helped in some way with the project”

Apparently, the support is there.

I would love to control a page that apple support links to. It would literally be my new hobby.

Or the guy working for that twitter profile had no idea what curl is and thought it was third-party software. Of course that wouldn't work that well for the author of curl who to put it mildly loves attention.

You can provide what you like for free. It's literally in the text of most OSS licenses: use at your own risk. The fact that large organisations are pointing their customers to the OSS project to answer their questions is a joke.

I'm glad your own side projects have helped you find good work, but you're hardly in the same position as curl here.

What is being offered: here's a cool program, use it as you like! What is given back: 10,000 users demanding personal 1 on 1 support and immediate attention from a solo developer, for free, at any time, at all time

How is this the same thing?

The author of curl chose to give it away under an open source license. Yes it would be nice if more corporations with deep pockets that use it would donate money and resources, but there’s no legal or ethical obligation for them to do so.

If you want people to pay for your software license it accordingly.

If this solo developer doesn’t like it, they are free to change the license, start charging for support, or just tell everyone that they can use it at their own risk.

That's not quite right. When I talked to Daniel at FOSDEM he had a seperate guy doing the support work, and he and the other guy are all sponsored. Not 100%, but good enough to still maintain coorp bullshit demands. This is totally different to 99% of all other open source projects.