Thursday October 19, 2017,

I arrived at the Technical Museum in Stockholm together with my two kids just a short while before 17:30. A fresh, cool and clear autumn evening. For this occasion I had purchased myself a brand new suit as I hadn’t gotten one since almost twenty years before this and it had been almost that long since I last wore it. I went for a slightly less conservative purple colored shirt with the dark suit.

Apart from my kids, my wife was of course also present and so was my brother Björn and my parents in law. Plus a few hundred other visitors, most of them of course unknown to me.

My eleven year old son truly appreciates this museum so we took the opportunity to quickly check out parts of the exhibitions while the pre-event mingling went on and drinks were served. Not too long though as we were soon asked to proceed to the restaurant part and take our assigned seats. I was seated at table #6.

The whole evening was not entirely “mine”, but as I am the winner of this year’s Polhem Prize it was setup to eventually lead to the hand over of the award to me. An evening for me. Lots of attention on me and references to my work through-out the evening, that otherwise had the theme of traffic safety (my guess is that’s partly due to last year’s Prize winner who was a lead person in the invention of seat belts in cars).

A three-course dinner, with some entertainment intermixed. At my table I sat next to some brilliant and interesting people and I had a great time and good conversations. Sitting across the table from the His Majesty the king of Sweden was an unexpected and awesome honor.

Somewhere mid-through the evening, a short movie was presented on the big screens. A (Swedish-speaking) movie with me trying to explain what curl is, what it does and why I’ve made it. I think the movie was really great and I think it helps explaining curl to non-techies (including my own family). The movie is the result of a perhaps 40 minutes interview/talk we did on camera and then a fair amount of skilled editing by the production company. (Available here.)

At around 21:30 I was called on stage. I received a gold medal from the king and shook his hand. I also received a diploma and a paper with the award committee’s motivation for me getting the prize. And huge bouquet of lovely flowers. A bit more than what I could hold in my arms really.

(me, and Carl XVI Gustaf, king of Sweden)

As the king graciously offered to hold my diploma and medal, I took the microphone and expressed a few words of thanks. I was and I still am genuinely and deeply moved by receiving this prize. I’m happy and proud. I said my piece in which I explicitly mentioned my family members by name: Anja, Agnes and Rex for bearing with me.

(me, H.M the king and Cecilia Schelin Seidegård)

Afterwards I received several appraisals for my short speech which made me even happier. Who would’ve thought that was even possible?

I posed for pictures, shook many hands, received many congratulations and I even participated in a few selfies until the time came when it was time for me and my family to escape into a taxi and go home.

What a night. In the cab home we scanned social media and awed over pictures and mentions. I hadn’t checked my phone even once during the event so it had piled up a bit. It’s great to have so many friends and acquaintances who shared this award and moment with us!

I also experienced a strong “post award emptiness” sort of feeling. Okay, that was it. That was great. Now it’s over. Back to reality again. Back to fixing bugs and responding to emails.

Thank you everyone who contributed to this! In whatever capacity.

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The Swedish motivation (shown in a picture above) goes like this, translated to English with google and edited by me:

Motivation for the Polhem Prize 2017

Our modern era consists of more and more ones and zeroes. Each individual programming tool that instructs technical machines to do
what we want has its own important function.

Everything that is connected needs to exchange information.  Twenty years ago, Daniel Stenberg started working on what we  now call cURL. Since then he has spent late evenings and weekends, doing unpaid work to refine his digital tool. It consists of open source code and allows you to retrieve data from home page URLs. The English letter c, see, makes it “see URL”.

In practice, its wide spread use means that millions, up to billions of people, worldwide, every day benefit from cURL in their mobile phones, computers, cars and a lot more. The economic value created with this can not be overestimated.

Daniel Stenberg initiated, keeps it together and leads the continuous development work with the tool. Completely voluntary. In total, nearly 1400 individuals have contributed. It is a solid engineering work and an expression of dedicated governance that has benefited many companies and the entire society. For this, Daniel Stenberg is awarded the Polhem Prize 2017.

I’m awarded the Swedish Polhem Prize 2017. (Link to a Swedish-speaking site.)

The Polhem Prize (Polhemspriset in Swedish), is awarded “for a high-level technological innovation or an ingenious solution to a technical problem.” The Swedish innovation must be available and shown competitive on the open market.

This award has been handed out in the name of the scientist and inventor Christopher Polhem, sometimes called the father of Swedish engineering, since 1878. It is Sweden’s oldest and most prestigious award for technological innovation.

I first got the news on the afternoon on September 24th and I don’t think I exaggerate much if I say that I got a mild shock. Me? A prize? How did they even find me or figure out what I’ve done?

I get this award for having worked on curl for a very long time, and by doing this having provided an Internet infrastructure of significant value to the world. I’ve never sold it nor earned much of commercial income from this hobby of mine, but my code now helps to power an almost unimaginable amount of devices, machines and other connected things in the world.

I’m not used to getting noticed or getting awards. I’m used to sitting by myself working on bugs, merging patches and responding to user emails. I don’t expect outsiders to notice what I do much and I always have a hard time to explain to friends and “mortals” what it is I actually do.

I accept this prize, not as a single inventor or brilliant mind of anything, but like the captain of a boat with a large and varying crew without whom I would never have reached this far. I’m excited that the nominee board found me and our merry project and that they were open-minded enough to see and realize the value and position of an open source project that is used literally everywhere. I feel deeply honored.

I’m fascinated the award nominee group found me and I think it is super cool that an open source project gets this attention and acknowledgement.

Apart from the honor, the prize comes in form of a monetary part (250K SEK, about 31,000 USD) and a gold medal with Polhem’s image on. See this blog post’s featured image. The official award ceremony will take place in a few days at the Technical Museum in Stockholm. I’m then supposed to get the medal handed to me by his royal highness Carl XVI Gustav , the king of Sweden. An honor very few people get to experience. Especially very few open source hackers.

Thank you

While I have so many people to thank for having contributed to my (and curl’s) success, there are some that have been fundamental.

I’d like to specifically highlight my wife Anja and my kids Agnes and Rex who are the ones I routinely steal time away from to instead spend on curl. They’re the ones who I drift away from when I respond to issues on the phones or run off to the computer to “just respond to something quickly”. They’re the best.

I’d like to thank Björn, my brother, who chipped in half the amount of money for that first Commodore 64 we purchased back in 1985 and which was the first stepping stone to me being here.

I’d like to thank all my friends and team mates in the curl project without whom curl would’ve died as an infant already in the 1990s. It is with honest communication, hard work and good will that good software is crafted. (Well, there might be some more components necessary too, but let’s keep it simple here.)

I’d like to thank everyone who ever said thanks to me for curl and told me that what I did or brought to the world actually made a difference or served a purpose. Positive feedback is what drives me. It is the fuel that keeps me going.

How will this award affect me and the curl project going forward?

I hope the award will strengthen my spine even more in knowing that we’re going down the right path here. Not necessarily with every single decision or choice we do, but the general one: we do things open source, we do things together and we work long-term.

I hope the award puts a little more light and attention on the world of open source and how this development model can produce the most stellar and robust software components you can think of – without a “best before” stamp.

I would like the award to make one or two more people find and take a closer look at the curl project. To dive in and contribute, in one way or another. We always need more eyes and hands!

Further, I realize that this award might bring some additional eyes on me who will watch how I act and behave. I intend to keep trying to do the right thing and act properly in every situation and I know my friends and community will help me stand straight – no matter how the winds blow.

What will I do with the money?

I intend to take my family with me on an extended vacation trip to New Zealand!

Hopefully there will be some money left afterward, that I hope to at least in part spend on curl related activities such as birthday cakes on the pending curl 20th birthday celebrations in spring 2018…

But really, how many use curl?

Virtually every smart phone has one or more curl installs. Most modern cars and television sets do as well. Probably just about all Linux servers on the Internet run it. Almost all PHP sites on the Internet do. Portable devices and internet-connected machines use it extensively. curl sends crash-reports when your Chrome or Firefox browser fail. It is the underlying data transfer engine for countless systems, languages, programs, games and environments.

Every single human in the connected world use something that runs curl every day. Probably more than once per day. Most have it installed in devices they carry around with them.

It is installed and runs in tens of billions of instances, as most modern-life rich people have numerous installations in their phones, with their web browsers, in their tablets, their cars, their TVs, their kitchen appliances etc.

Most humans, of course, don’t know this. They use devices and apps that just work and are fine with that. curl is just a little piece in the engines of those systems.