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Bloomberg sponsors curl with 10K USD
- zevv 4y agoHooray. That'll pay for one developer for one month. [insert mandatory "dependency" xkcd here]
- MontyCarloHall 4y agoOr 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?
- springogeek 4y agoWhat 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.
- dewey 4y agoI suggest scrolling through his blog a bit: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/
- hgsgm 4y agoDoesn'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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- whent 4y ago> 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?
- whalesalad 4y agoThose are rookie numbers, Bloomberg. Gotta pump those numbers up.
- varjag 4y agoBloomberg is hardly the heaviest user of foss tech out here, and so far contributed 10k more than nearly all others.
- solarkraft 4y agoMaybe 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.
- digdugdirk 4y agoHas there been any research done into quantifying the economic value of open source projects like curl? Or even open source projects in general?
- siva7 4y agoWithout the open source community there would be no YC so i'm glad that at least some companies show courage.
- chatmasta 4y ago[flagged]
- paulryanrogers 4y agoDoubtful political allegiance plays much of a role on deciding where and how much to donate to FOSS.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MR4D 4y agoDumb 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.
- spyremeown 4y agobagder 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.
- bombcar 4y agoI'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.
- is_true 4y agoThen he should be a $POSITION at $BIGCORP. I don't think this is the correct way to determine how much money a project needs.
- geodel 4y agoExactly. Attitude here seems to be kicking gift horse in the mouth.
- spyremeown 4y agoI 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?
- rglullis 4y agoUnless 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?"
- rvz 4y ago$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.
- em500 4y agoMaybe 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-years-on-the-mac/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/09/25/curls-first-twenty-ye...
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago> 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.
- scarface74 4y agoWhy do people take time creating open source code that says anyone can use it freely and then complain when anyone uses it freely?
- krapp 4y agoBecause 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.
- varjag 4y agoI'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.
- schnebbau 4y agoYou 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.
- whent 4y agoThis! 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?
- graderjs 4y agoYou 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.
- whent 4y agoOf 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.
- graderjs 4y agoNo 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.
- whent 4y agoI 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.
- mobileexpert 4y agoGood. Thank you. I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth here.
- sokoloff 4y agoYou, Daniel Stenberg, and the curl project (and I) seem to agree that's the appropriate reaction here. Some other bystanders appear to disagree.
- chidog12 4y ago$10,000 > $0
- Entinel 4y agoGlad 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.
- nwellnhof 4y agoTrue. 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.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI 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.
- galdor 4y agoWhy 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.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago> 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?
- scarface74 4y agoStream it for a “profit” of $0.06 per stream?
- dhagz 4y agoAh yes, because /that's/ the important part of the argument.
- scarface74 4y ago> 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.
- PopAlongKid 4y ago>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-pays-per-stream https://edm.com/industry/how-much-each-streaming-platform-pa...
- throwawaysalome 4y agoWhen is open-source going to admit they traded money for influence? Altruism is not a thing, people.
- markus_zhang 4y agoIt'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.
- pythonhacker69 4y agoBloomberg announcement about supporting open source projects https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/bloomberg-ospo-launches-foss-contributor-fund/ https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/bloomberg-ospo-lau...
- chadash 4y agoThis 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.
- firebirdn99 4y agoUngrateful 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.
- firebirdn99 4y ago[flagged]
- tbabej 4y agoIn 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 https://github.com/orgs/ProteinQure/sponsoring
- notpushkin 4y agoMy little one man agency supports 17 organizations now: https://github.com/orgs/A-Edge/sponsoring 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.
- solarkraft 4y agoA 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).
- 16th_hop 4y ago$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-launches-foss-contributor-fund/ https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/bloomberg-ospo-lau...