The Linux Foundation, the organization that we want to love but that so often makes that a hard bargain, has created something they call “Insights” where they gather lots of metrics on Open Source projects.

I held back so I never blogged and taunted OpenSSF for their scorecard attempts that were always lame and misguided. This Insights thing looks like their next attempt to “grade” and “rate” Open Source. It is so flawed and full of questionable details that I decided there is no point in me listing them all in a blog post – it would just be too long and boring. Instead I will just focus on a single metric. The one that made me laugh out load when I saw it.

Package downloads

They claim curl was downloaded 10,467 times the last year. (source)

What does “a download” mean? They refer to statistics from ecosyste.ms, which is an awesome site and service, but it has absolutely no idea about curl downloads.

How often is curl “downloaded”?

curl release tarballs are downloaded from curl.se at a rate of roughly 250,000 / month.

curl images are currently pulled from docker at a rate of around 400,000 – 700,000 / day. curl is pulled from quay.io at roughly the same rate.

curl’s git repository is cloned roughly 32,000 times / day

curl is installed from Linux and BSD distributions at an unknown rate.

curl, in the form of libcurl, is bundled in countless applications, games, devices, cars, TVs, printers and services, and we cannot even guess how often it is downloaded as such an embedded component.

curl is installed by default on every Windows and macOS system since many years back.

But no, 10,467 they say.