As a cynical Enterprise person, my take is that some team within M$ wanted to force some other team to no longer use Curl/Libcurl for "reasons", so they had to

As a cynical Enterprise person, my take is that some team within M$ wanted to force some other team to no longer use Curl/Libcurl for "reasons", so they had to gut it and replace pieces with some other team's cruft. There is no interest in upstreaming, supporting, extending, documenting, releasing, etc this monstrosity as it was probably an ugly kludge to meet an internal bureaucratic requirement. This is why the MIT license is great. If it was GPL'd or something, they would have to rip out curl entirely and develop a completely in-house library, which takes more time, costs more, adds bugs, etc. On top of adapting any programs that normally use libcurl to use their custom thing, or creating a shim library (either way more work). MIT-licensed code allows corporations to still build on top of open source, and monkey-patch their own shittiness in the process. Many of us OSS devs choose MIT for this reason: we just want more people to be able to use it.