Why would it not be?

If daniel has no vested interest in owning a Mac, then obviously he should not buy one. I also believe that daniel is not entitled to a free Mac just because he chose to write free software.

If apple find curl useful enough to ship with their products, surely they can afford to send him a small OSX box to help him fix bugs on. I certainly don’t expect him to spend his own money on such a device.

The point is still not about exactly how much money the devices cost. The point is still that if I would buy one, it would be solely for curl hacking and not for much else and I find it hard to motivate.

The reason for sharing the link to the source code was for you to see the patches.

I can assure you that a Mac Mini in the configuration you noted above will more than suffice. It is trivial to boot multiple operating systems on it as well to satisfy that need.

Obviously, you can find a refurb or used one for much less.

I’m not trolling. I’m not a Mac guy so I really don’t know what I would need to develop on. I somehow guess(ed) that just putting a Mini in a corner with a RJ45 plugged in wouldn’t be enough. I don’t think any of that is my point though. I don’t think spending 600USD on a box I don’t need is any fun either.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/curl/curl-42/

Here is a link where you can buy a Mac Mini (no sales tax, no shipping):

http://www.expercom.com/browse_by_category.html?CATEGORY_ID=292

Why do you think you need to spend $2k, or are you trolling?

Actually, the testing part is pretty well covered in the curl project. You can also find out how to help the project by doing automated build+tests by reading this:

http://curl.haxx.se/docs/testcurl.html

What is less good covered is developers who are using non-linux platforms who are dedicated enough to dig into the code, sort out problems, track down bugs and research better ways to do things. Hence it is often me doing that, even when the problem only appears on platform I never use or never even see…